Of Human Bondage
by W. Somerset Maugham
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman
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"All right. What shall we do?" answered Hayward.

"Let's get on a penny steamboat and go down to Greenwich."

The idea appealed to Hayward, and they jumped into a cab which took them
to Westminster Bridge. They got on the steamboat just as she was starting.
Presently Philip, a smile on his lips, spoke.

"I remember when first I went to Paris, Clutton, I think it was, gave a
long discourse on the subject that beauty is put into things by painters
and poets. They create beauty. In themselves there is nothing to choose
between the Campanile of Giotto and a factory chimney. And then beautiful
things grow rich with the emotion that they have aroused in succeeding
generations. That is why old things are more beautiful than modern. The
Ode on a Grecian Urn is more lovely now than when it was written,
because for a hundred years lovers have read it and the sick at heart
taken comfort in its lines."

Philip left Hayward to infer what in the passing scene had suggested these
words to him, and it was a delight to know that he could safely leave the
inference. It was in sudden reaction from the life he had been leading for
so long that he was now deeply affected. The delicate iridescence of the
London air gave the softness of a pastel to the gray stone of the
buildings; and in the wharfs and storehouses there was the severity of
grace of a Japanese print. They went further down; and the splendid
channel, a symbol of the great empire, broadened, and it was crowded with
traffic; Philip thought of the painters and the poets who had made all
these things so beautiful, and his heart was filled with gratitude. They
came to the Pool of London, and who can describe its majesty? The
imagination thrills, and Heaven knows what figures people still its broad
stream, Doctor Johnson with Boswell by his side, an old Pepys going on
board a man-o'-war: the pageant of English history, and romance, and high
adventure. Philip turned to Hayward with shining eyes.

"Dear Charles Dickens," he murmured, smiling a little at his own emotion.

"Aren't you rather sorry you chucked painting?" asked Hayward.

"No."

"I suppose you like doctoring?"

"No, I hate it, but there was nothing else to do. The drudgery of the
first two years is awful, and unfortunately I haven't got the scientific
temperament."

"Well, you can't go on changing professions."

"Oh, no. I'm going to stick to this. I think I shall like it better when
I get into the wards. I have an idea that I'm more interested in people
than in anything else in the world. And as far as I can see, it's the only
profession in which you have your freedom. You carry your knowledge in
your head; with a box of instruments and a few drugs you can make your
living anywhere."

"Aren't you going to take a practice then?"

"Not for a good long time at any rate," Philip answered. "As soon as I've
got through my hospital appointments I shall get a ship; I want to go to
the East--the Malay Archipelago, Siam, China, and all that sort of
thing--and then I shall take odd jobs. Something always comes along,
cholera duty in India and things like that. I want to go from place to
place. I want to see the world. The only way a poor man can do that is by
going in for the medical."

They came to Greenwich then. The noble building of Inigo Jones faced the
river grandly.

"I say, look, that must be the place where Poor Jack dived into the mud
for pennies," said Philip.

They wandered in the park. Ragged children were playing in it, and it was
noisy with their cries: here and there old seamen were basking in the sun.
There was an air of a hundred years ago.

"It seems a pity you wasted two years in Paris," said Hayward.

"Waste? Look at the movement of that child, look at the pattern which the
sun makes on the ground, shining through the trees, look at that sky--why,
I should never have seen that sky if I hadn't been to Paris."

Hayward thought that Philip choked a sob, and he looked at him with
astonishment.

"What's the matter with you?"

"Nothing. I'm sorry to be so damned emotional, but for six months I've
been starved for beauty."

"You used to be so matter of fact. It's very interesting to hear you say
that."

"Damn it all, I don't want to be interesting," laughed Philip. "Let's go
and have a stodgy tea."

LXV

Hayward's visit did Philip a great deal of good. Each day his thoughts
dwelt less on Mildred. He looked back upon the past with disgust. He could
not understand how he had submitted to the dishonour of such a love; and
when he thought of Mildred it was with angry hatred, because she had
submitted him to so much humiliation. His imagination presented her to him
now with her defects of person and manner exaggerated, so that he
shuddered at the thought of having been connected with her.

"It just shows how damned weak I am," he said to himself. The adventure
was like a blunder that one had committed at a party so horrible that one
felt nothing could be done to excuse it: the only remedy was to forget.
His horror at the degradation he had suffered helped him. He was like a
snake casting its skin and he looked upon the old covering with nausea. He
exulted in the possession of himself once more; he realised how much of
the delight of the world he had lost when he was absorbed in that madness
which they called love; he had had enough of it; he did not want to be in
love any more if love was that. Philip told Hayward something of what he
had gone through.

"Wasn't it Sophocles," he asked, "who prayed for the time when he would be
delivered from the wild beast of passion that devoured his heart-strings?"

Philip seemed really to be born again. He breathed the circumambient air
as though he had never breathed it before, and he took a child's pleasure
in all the facts of the world. He called his period of insanity six
months' hard labour.

Hayward had only been settled in London a few days when Philip received
from Blackstable, where it had been sent, a card for a private view at
some picture gallery. He took Hayward, and, on looking at the catalogue,
saw that Lawson had a picture in it.

"I suppose he sent the card," said Philip. "Let's go and find him, he's
sure to be in front of his picture."

This, a profile of Ruth Chalice, was tucked away in a corner, and Lawson
was not far from it. He looked a little lost, in his large soft hat and
loose, pale clothes, amongst the fashionable throng that had gathered for
the private view. He greeted Philip with enthusiasm, and with his usual
volubility told him that he had come to live in London, Ruth Chalice was
a hussy, he had taken a studio, Paris was played out, he had a commission
for a portrait, and they'd better dine together and have a good old talk.
Philip reminded him of his acquaintance with Hayward, and was entertained
to see that Lawson was slightly awed by Hayward's elegant clothes and
grand manner. They sat upon him better than they had done in the shabby
little studio which Lawson and Philip had shared.

At dinner Lawson went on with his news. Flanagan had gone back to America.
Clutton had disappeared. He had come to the conclusion that a man had no
chance of doing anything so long as he was in contact with art and
artists: the only thing was to get right away. To make the step easier he
had quarrelled with all his friends in Paris. He developed a talent for
telling them home truths, which made them bear with fortitude his
declaration that he had done with that city and was settling in Gerona, a
little town in the north of Spain which had attracted him when he saw it
from the train on his way to Barcelona. He was living there now alone.

"I wonder if he'll ever do any good," said Philip.

He was interested in the human side of that struggle to express something
which was so obscure in the man's mind that he was become morbid and
querulous. Philip felt vaguely that he was himself in the same case, but
with him it was the conduct of his life as a whole that perplexed him.
That was his means of self-expression, and what he must do with it was not
clear. But he had no time to continue with this train of thought, for
Lawson poured out a frank recital of his affair with Ruth Chalice. She had
left him for a young student who had just come from England, and was
behaving in a scandalous fashion. Lawson really thought someone ought to
step in and save the young man. She would ruin him. Philip gathered that
Lawson's chief grievance was that the rupture had come in the middle of a
portrait he was painting.

"Women have no real feeling for art," he said. "They only pretend they
have." But he finished philosophically enough: "However, I got four
portraits out of her, and I'm not sure if the last I was working on would
ever have been a success."

Philip envied the easy way in which the painter managed his love affairs.
He had passed eighteen months pleasantly enough, had got an excellent
model for nothing, and had parted from her at the end with no great pang.

"And what about Cronshaw?" asked Philip.

"Oh, he's done for," answered Lawson, with the cheerful callousness of his
youth. "He'll be dead in six months. He got pneumonia last winter. He was
in the English hospital for seven weeks, and when he came out they told
him his only chance was to give up liquor."

"Poor devil," smiled the abstemious Philip.

"He kept off for a bit. He used to go to the Lilas all the same, he
couldn't keep away from that, but he used to drink hot milk, avec de la
fleur d'oranger, and he was damned dull."

"I take it you did not conceal the fact from him."

"Oh, he knew it himself. A little while ago he started on whiskey again.
He said he was too old to turn over any new leaves. He would rather be
happy for six months and die at the end of it than linger on for five
years. And then I think he's been awfully hard up lately. You see, he
didn't earn anything while he was ill, and the slut he lives with has been
giving him a rotten time."

"I remember, the first time I saw him I admired him awfully," said Philip.
"I thought he was wonderful. It is sickening that vulgar, middle-class
virtue should pay."

"Of course he was a rotter. He was bound to end in the gutter sooner or
later," said Lawson.

Philip was hurt because Lawson would not see the pity of it. Of course it
was cause and effect, but in the necessity with which one follows the
other lay all tragedy of life.

"Oh, I' d forgotten," said Lawson. "Just after you left he sent round a
present for you. I thought you'd be coming back and I didn't bother about
it, and then I didn't think it worth sending on; but it'll come over to
London with the rest of my things, and you can come to my studio one day
and fetch it away if you want it."

"You haven't told me what it is yet."

"Oh, it's only a ragged little bit of carpet. I shouldn't think it's worth
anything. I asked him one day what the devil he'd sent the filthy thing
for. He told me he'd seen it in a shop in the Rue de Rennes and bought it
for fifteen francs. It appears to be a Persian rug. He said you'd asked
him the meaning of life and that was the answer. But he was very drunk."

Philip laughed.

"Oh yes, I know. I'll take it. It was a favourite wheeze of his. He said
I must find out for myself, or else the answer meant nothing."

LXVI

Philip worked well and easily; he had a good deal to do, since he was
taking in July the three parts of the First Conjoint examination, two of
which he had failed in before; but he found life pleasant. He made a new
friend. Lawson, on the lookout for models, had discovered a girl who was
understudying at one of the theatres, and in order to induce her to sit to
him arranged a little luncheon-party one Sunday. She brought a chaperon
with her; and to her Philip, asked to make a fourth, was instructed to
confine his attentions. He found this easy, since she turned out to be an
agreeable chatterbox with an amusing tongue. She asked Philip to go and
see her; she had rooms in Vincent Square, and was always in to tea at five
o'clock; he went, was delighted with his welcome, and went again. Mrs.
Nesbit was not more than twenty-five, very small, with a pleasant, ugly
face; she had very bright eyes, high cheekbones, and a large mouth: the
excessive contrasts of her colouring reminded one of a portrait by one of
the modern French painters; her skin was very white, her cheeks were very
red, her thick eyebrows, her hair, were very black. The effect was odd, a
little unnatural, but far from unpleasing. She was separated from her
husband and earned her living and her child's by writing penny novelettes.
There were one or two publishers who made a specialty of that sort of
thing, and she had as much work as she could do. It was ill-paid, she
received fifteen pounds for a story of thirty thousand words; but she was
satisfied.

"After all, it only costs the reader twopence," she said, "and they like
the same thing over and over again. I just change the names and that's
all. When I'm bored I think of the washing and the rent and clothes for
baby, and I go on again."

Besides, she walked on at various theatres where they wanted supers and
earned by this when in work from sixteen shillings to a guinea a week. At
the end of her day she was so tired that she slept like a top. She made
the best of her difficult lot. Her keen sense of humour enabled her to get
amusement out of every vexatious circumstance. Sometimes things went
wrong, and she found herself with no money at all; then her trifling
possessions found their way to a pawnshop in the Vauxhall Bridge Road, and
she ate bread and butter till things grew brighter. She never lost her
cheerfulness.

Philip was interested in her shiftless life, and she made him laugh with
the fantastic narration of her struggles. He asked her why she did not try
her hand at literary work of a better sort, but she knew that she had no
talent, and the abominable stuff she turned out by the thousand words was
not only tolerably paid, but was the best she could do. She had nothing to
look forward to but a continuation of the life she led. She seemed to have
no relations, and her friends were as poor as herself.

"I don't think of the future," she said. "As long as I have enough money
for three weeks' rent and a pound or two over for food I never bother.
Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the
present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens."

Soon Philip grew in the habit of going in to tea with her every day, and
so that his visits might not embarrass her he took in a cake or a pound of
butter or some tea. They started to call one another by their Christian
names. Feminine sympathy was new to him, and he delighted in someone who
gave a willing ear to all his troubles. The hours went quickly. He did not
hide his admiration for her. She was a delightful companion. He could not
help comparing her with Mildred; and he contrasted with the one's
obstinate stupidity, which refused interest to everything she did not
know, the other's quick appreciation and ready intelligence. His heart
sank when he thought that he might have been tied for life to such a woman
as Mildred. One evening he told Norah the whole story of his love. It was
not one to give him much reason for self-esteem, and it was very pleasant
to receive such charming sympathy.

"I think you're well out of it," she said, when he had finished.

She had a funny way at times of holding her head on one side like an
Aberdeen puppy. She was sitting in an upright chair, sewing, for she had
no time to do nothing, and Philip had made himself comfortable at her
feet.

"I can't tell you how heartily thankful I am it's all over," he sighed.

"Poor thing, you must have had a rotten time," she murmured, and by way of
showing her sympathy put her hand on his shoulder.

He took it and kissed it, but she withdrew it quickly.

"Why did you do that?" she asked, with a blush.

"Have you any objection?"

She looked at him for a moment with twinkling eyes, and she smiled.

"No," she said.

He got up on his knees and faced her. She looked into his eyes steadily,
and her large mouth trembled with a smile.

"Well?" she said.

"You know, you are a ripper. I'm so grateful to you for being nice to me.
I like you so much."

"Don't be idiotic," she said.

Philip took hold of her elbows and drew her towards him. She made no
resistance, but bent forward a little, and he kissed her red lips.

"Why did you do that?" she asked again.

"Because it's comfortable."

She did not answer, but a tender look came into her eyes, and she passed
her hand softly over his hair.

"You know, it's awfully silly of you to behave like this. We were such
good friends. It would be so jolly to leave it at that."

"If you really want to appeal to my better nature," replied Philip,
"you'll do well not to stroke my cheek while you're doing it."

She gave a little chuckle, but she did not stop.

"It's very wrong of me, isn't it?" she said.

Philip, surprised and a little amused, looked into her eyes, and as he
looked he saw them soften and grow liquid, and there was an expression in
them that enchanted him. His heart was suddenly stirred, and tears came to
his eyes.

"Norah, you're not fond of me, are you?" he asked, incredulously.

"You clever boy, you ask such stupid questions."

"Oh, my dear, it never struck me that you could be."

He flung his arms round her and kissed her, while she, laughing, blushing,
and crying, surrendered herself willingly to his embrace.

Presently he released her and sitting back on his heels looked at her
curiously.

"Well, I'm blowed!" he said.

"Why?"

"I'm so surprised."

"And pleased?"

"Delighted," he cried with all his heart, "and so proud and so happy and
so grateful."

He took her hands and covered them with kisses. This was the beginning for
Philip of a happiness which seemed both solid and durable. They became
lovers but remained friends. There was in Norah a maternal instinct which
received satisfaction in her love for Philip; she wanted someone to pet,
and scold, and make a fuss of; she had a domestic temperament and found
pleasure in looking after his health and his linen. She pitied his
deformity, over which he was so sensitive, and her pity expressed itself
instinctively in tenderness. She was young, strong, and healthy, and it
seemed quite natural to her to give her love. She had high spirits and a
merry soul. She liked Philip because he laughed with her at all the
amusing things in life that caught her fancy, and above all she liked him
because he was he.

When she told him this he answered gaily:

"Nonsense. You like me because I'm a silent person and never want to get
a word in."

Philip did not love her at all. He was extremely fond of her, glad to be
with her, amused and interested by her conversation. She restored his
belief in himself and put healing ointments, as it were, on all the
bruises of his soul. He was immensely flattered that she cared for him. He
admired her courage, her optimism, her impudent defiance of fate; she had
a little philosophy of her own, ingenuous and practical.

"You know, I don't believe in churches and parsons and all that," she
said, "but I believe in God, and I don't believe He minds much about what
you do as long as you keep your end up and help a lame dog over a stile
when you can. And I think people on the whole are very nice, and I'm sorry
for those who aren't."

"And what about afterwards?" asked Philip.

"Oh, well, I don't know for certain, you know," she smiled, "but I hope
for the best. And anyhow there'll be no rent to pay and no novelettes to
write."

She had a feminine gift for delicate flattery. She thought that Philip did
a brave thing when he left Paris because he was conscious he could not be
a great artist; and he was enchanted when she expressed enthusiastic
admiration for him. He had never been quite certain whether this action
indicated courage or infirmity of purpose. It was delightful to realise
that she considered it heroic. She ventured to tackle him on a subject
which his friends instinctively avoided.

"It's very silly of you to be so sensitive about your club-foot," she
said. She saw him bush darkly, but went on. "You know, people don't think
about it nearly as much as you do. They notice it the first time they see
you, and then they forget about it."

He would not answer.

"You're not angry with me, are you?"

"No."

She put her arm round his neck.

"You know, I only speak about it because I love you. I don't want it to
make you unhappy."

"I think you can say anything you choose to me," he answered, smiling. "I
wish I could do something to show you how grateful I am to you."

She took him in hand in other ways. She would not let him be bearish and
laughed at him when he was out of temper. She made him more urbane.

"You can make me do anything you like," he said to her once.

"D'you mind?"

"No, I want to do what you like."

He had the sense to realise his happiness. It seemed to him that she gave
him all that a wife could, and he preserved his freedom; she was the most
charming friend he had ever had, with a sympathy that he had never found
in a man. The sexual relationship was no more than the strongest link in
their friendship. It completed it, but was not essential. And because
Philip's appetites were satisfied, he became more equable and easier to
live with. He felt in complete possession of himself. He thought sometimes
of the winter, during which he had been obsessed by a hideous passion, and
he was filled with loathing for Mildred and with horror of himself.

His examinations were approaching, and Norah was as interested in them as
he. He was flattered and touched by her eagerness. She made him promise to
come at once and tell her the results. He passed the three parts this time
without mishap, and when he went to tell her she burst into tears.

"Oh, I'm so glad, I was so anxious."

"You silly little thing," he laughed, but he was choking.

No one could help being pleased with the way she took it.

"And what are you going to do now?" she asked.

"I can take a holiday with a clear conscience. I have no work to do till
the winter session begins in October."

"I suppose you'll go down to your uncle's at Blackstable?"

"You suppose quite wrong. I'm going to stay in London and play with you."

"I'd rather you went away."

"Why? Are you tired of me?"

She laughed and put her hands on his shoulders.

"Because you've been working hard, and you look utterly washed out. You
want some fresh air and a rest. Please go."

He did not answer for a moment. He looked at her with loving eyes.

"You know, I'd never believe it of anyone but you. You're only thinking of
my good. I wonder what you see in me."

"Will you give me a good character with my month's notice?" she laughed
gaily.

"I'll say that you're thoughtful and kind, and you're not exacting; you
never worry, you're not troublesome, and you're easy to please."

"All that's nonsense," she said, "but I'll tell you one thing: I'm one of
the few persons I ever met who are able to learn from experience."

LXVII

Philip looked forward to his return to London with impatience. During the
two months he spent at Blackstable Norah wrote to him frequently, long
letters in a bold, large hand, in which with cheerful humour she described
the little events of the daily round, the domestic troubles of her
landlady, rich food for laughter, the comic vexations of her
rehearsals--she was walking on in an important spectacle at one of the
London theatres--and her odd adventures with the publishers of novelettes.
Philip read a great deal, bathed, played tennis, and sailed. At the
beginning of October he settled down in London to work for the Second
Conjoint examination. He was eager to pass it, since that ended the
drudgery of the curriculum; after it was done with the student became an
out-patients' clerk, and was brought in contact with men and women as well
as with text-books. Philip saw Norah every day.

Lawson had been spending the summer at Poole, and had a number of sketches
to show of the harbour and of the beach. He had a couple of commissions
for portraits and proposed to stay in London till the bad light drove him
away. Hayward, in London too, intended to spend the winter abroad, but
remained week after week from sheer inability to make up his mind to go.
Hayward had run to fat during the last two or three years--it was five
years since Philip first met him in Heidelberg--and he was prematurely
bald. He was very sensitive about it and wore his hair long to conceal the
unsightly patch on the crown of his head. His only consolation was that
his brow was now very noble. His blue eyes had lost their colour; they had
a listless droop; and his mouth, losing the fulness of youth, was weak and
pale. He still talked vaguely of the things he was going to do in the
future, but with less conviction; and he was conscious that his friends no
longer believed in him: when he had drank two or three glasses of whiskey
he was inclined to be elegiac.

"I'm a failure," he murmured, "I'm unfit for the brutality of the struggle
of life. All I can do is to stand aside and let the vulgar throng hustle
by in their pursuit of the good things."

He gave you the impression that to fail was a more delicate, a more
exquisite thing, than to succeed. He insinuated that his aloofness was due
to distaste for all that was common and low. He talked beautifully of
Plato.

"I should have thought you'd got through with Plato by now," said Philip
impatiently.

"Would you?" he asked, raising his eyebrows.

He was not inclined to pursue the subject. He had discovered of late the
effective dignity of silence.

"I don't see the use of reading the same thing over and over again," said
Philip. "That's only a laborious form of idleness."

"But are you under the impression that you have so great a mind that you
can understand the most profound writer at a first reading?"

"I don't want to understand him, I'm not a critic. I'm not interested in
him for his sake but for mine."

"Why d'you read then?"

"Partly for pleasure, because it's a habit and I'm just as uncomfortable
if I don't read as if I don't smoke, and partly to know myself. When I
read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come
across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for ME,
and it becomes part of me; I've got out of the book all that's any use to
me, and I can't get anything more if I read it a dozen times. You see, it
seems to me, one's like a closed bud, and most of what one reads and does
has no effect at all; but there are certain things that have a peculiar
significance for one, and they open a petal; and the petals open one by
one; and at last the flower is there."

Philip was not satisfied with his metaphor, but he did not know how else
to explain a thing which he felt and yet was not clear about.

"You want to do things, you want to become things," said Hayward, with a
shrug of the shoulders. "It's so vulgar."

Philip knew Hayward very well by now. He was weak and vain, so vain that
you had to be on the watch constantly not to hurt his feelings; he mingled
idleness and idealism so that he could not separate them. At Lawson's
studio one day he met a journalist, who was charmed by his conversation,
and a week later the editor of a paper wrote to suggest that he should do
some criticism for him. For forty-eight hours Hayward lived in an agony of
indecision. He had talked of getting occupation of this sort so long that
he had not the face to refuse outright, but the thought of doing anything
filled him with panic. At last he declined the offer and breathed freely.

"It would have interfered with my work," he told Philip.

"What work?" asked Philip brutally.

"My inner life," he answered.

Then he went on to say beautiful things about Amiel, the professor of
Geneva, whose brilliancy promised achievement which was never fulfilled;
till at his death the reason of his failure and the excuse were at once
manifest in the minute, wonderful journal which was found among his
papers. Hayward smiled enigmatically.

But Hayward could still talk delightfully about books; his taste was
exquisite and his discrimination elegant; and he had a constant interest
in ideas, which made him an entertaining companion. They meant nothing to
him really, since they never had any effect on him; but he treated them as
he might have pieces of china in an auction-room, handling them with
pleasure in their shape and their glaze, pricing them in his mind; and
then, putting them back into their case, thought of them no more.

And it was Hayward who made a momentous discovery. One evening, after due
preparation, he took Philip and Lawson to a tavern situated in Beak
Street, remarkable not only in itself and for its history--it had memories
of eighteenth-century glories which excited the romantic imagination--but
for its snuff, which was the best in London, and above all for its punch.
Hayward led them into a large, long room, dingily magnificent, with huge
pictures on the walls of nude women: they were vast allegories of the
school of Haydon; but smoke, gas, and the London atmosphere had given them
a richness which made them look like old masters. The dark panelling, the
massive, tarnished gold of the cornice, the mahogany tables, gave the room
an air of sumptuous comfort, and the leather-covered seats along the wall
were soft and easy. There was a ram's head on a table opposite the door,
and this contained the celebrated snuff. They ordered punch. They drank
it. It was hot rum punch. The pen falters when it attempts to treat of the
excellence thereof; the sober vocabulary, the sparse epithet of this
narrative, are inadequate to the task; and pompous terms, jewelled, exotic
phrases rise to the excited fancy. It warmed the blood and cleared the
head; it filled the soul with well-being; it disposed the mind at once to
utter wit and to appreciate the wit of others; it had the vagueness of
music and the precision of mathematics. Only one of its qualities was
comparable to anything else: it had the warmth of a good heart; but its
taste, its smell, its feel, were not to be described in words. Charles
Lamb, with his infinite tact, attempting to, might have drawn charming
pictures of the life of his day; Lord Byron in a stanza of Don Juan,
aiming at the impossible, might have achieved the sublime; Oscar Wilde,
heaping jewels of Ispahan upon brocades of Byzantium, might have created
a troubling beauty. Considering it, the mind reeled under visions of the
feasts of Elagabalus; and the subtle harmonies of Debussy mingled with the
musty, fragrant romance of chests in which have been kept old clothes,
ruffs, hose, doublets, of a forgotten generation, and the wan odour of
lilies of the valley and the savour of Cheddar cheese.

Hayward discovered the tavern at which this priceless beverage was to be
obtained by meeting in the street a man called Macalister who had been at
Cambridge with him. He was a stockbroker and a philosopher. He was
accustomed to go to the tavern once a week; and soon Philip, Lawson, and
Hayward got into the habit of meeting there every Tuesday evening: change
of manners made it now little frequented, which was an advantage to
persons who took pleasure in conversation. Macalister was a big-boned
fellow, much too short for his width, with a large, fleshy face and a soft
voice. He was a student of Kant and judged everything from the standpoint
of pure reason. He was fond of expounding his doctrines. Philip listened
with excited interest. He had long come to the conclusion that nothing
amused him more than metaphysics, but he was not so sure of their efficacy
in the affairs of life. The neat little system which he had formed as the
result of his meditations at Blackstable had not been of conspicuous use
during his infatuation for Mildred. He could not be positive that reason
was much help in the conduct of life. It seemed to him that life lived
itself. He remembered very vividly the violence of the emotion which had
possessed him and his inability, as if he were tied down to the ground
with ropes, to react against it. He read many wise things in books, but he
could only judge from his own experience (he did not know whether he was
different from other people); he did not calculate the pros and cons of an
action, the benefits which must befall him if he did it, the harm which
might result from the omission; but his whole being was urged on
irresistibly. He did not act with a part of himself but altogether. The
power that possessed him seemed to have nothing to do with reason: all
that reason did was to point out the methods of obtaining what his whole
soul was striving for.

Macalister reminded him of the Categorical Imperative.

"Act so that every action of yours should be capable of becoming a
universal rule of action for all men."

"That seems to me perfect nonsense," said Philip.

"You're a bold man to say that of anything stated by Immanuel Kant,"
retorted Macalister.

"Why? Reverence for what somebody said is a stultifying quality: there's
a damned sight too much reverence in the world. Kant thought things not
because they were true, but because he was Kant."

"Well, what is your objection to the Categorical Imperative?" (They talked
as though the fate of empires were in the balance.)

"It suggests that one can choose one's course by an effort of will. And it
suggests that reason is the surest guide. Why should its dictates be any
better than those of passion? They're different. That's all."

"You seem to be a contented slave of your passions."

"A slave because I can't help myself, but not a contented one," laughed
Philip.

While he spoke he thought of that hot madness which had driven him in
pursuit of Mildred. He remembered how he had chafed against it and how he
had felt the degradation of it.

"Thank God, I'm free from all that now," he thought.

And yet even as he said it he was not quite sure whether he spoke
sincerely. When he was under the influence of passion he had felt a
singular vigour, and his mind had worked with unwonted force. He was more
alive, there was an excitement in sheer being, an eager vehemence of soul,
which made life now a trifle dull. For all the misery he had endured there
was a compensation in that sense of rushing, overwhelming existence.

But Philip's unlucky words engaged him in a discussion on the freedom of
the will, and Macalister, with his well-stored memory, brought out
argument after argument. He had a mind that delighted in dialectics, and
he forced Philip to contradict himself; he pushed him into corners from
which he could only escape by damaging concessions; he tripped him up with
logic and battered him with authorities.

At last Philip said:

"Well, I can't say anything about other people. I can only speak for
myself. The illusion of free will is so strong in my mind that I can't get
away from it, but I believe it is only an illusion. But it is an illusion
which is one of the strongest motives of my actions. Before I do anything
I feel that I have choice, and that influences what I do; but afterwards,
when the thing is done, I believe that it was inevitable from all
eternity."

"What do you deduce from that?" asked Hayward.

"Why, merely the futility of regret. It's no good crying over spilt milk,
because all the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it."

LXVIII

One morning Philip on getting up felt his head swim, and going back to bed
suddenly discovered he was ill. All his limbs ached and he shivered with
cold. When the landlady brought in his breakfast he called to her through
the open door that he was not well, and asked for a cup of tea and a piece
of toast. A few minutes later there was a knock at his door, and Griffiths
came in. They had lived in the same house for over a year, but had never
done more than nod to one another in the passage.

"I say, I hear you're seedy," said Griffiths. "I thought I'd come in and
see what was the matter with you."

Philip, blushing he knew not why, made light of the whole thing. He would
be all right in an hour or two.

"Well, you'd better let me take your temperature," said Griffiths.

"It's quite unnecessary," answered Philip irritably.

"Come on."

Philip put the thermometer in his mouth. Griffiths sat on the side of the
bed and chatted brightly for a moment, then he took it out and looked at
it.

"Now, look here, old man, you must stay in bed, and I'll bring old Deacon
in to have a look at you."

"Nonsense," said Philip. "There's nothing the matter. I wish you wouldn't
bother about me."

"But it isn't any bother. You've got a temperature and you must stay in
bed. You will, won't you?"

There was a peculiar charm in his manner, a mingling of gravity and
kindliness, which was infinitely attractive.

"You've got a wonderful bed-side manner," Philip murmured, closing his
eyes with a smile.

Griffiths shook out his pillow for him, deftly smoothed down the
bedclothes, and tucked him up. He went into Philip's sitting-room to look
for a siphon, could not find one, and fetched it from his own room. He
drew down the blind.

"Now, go to sleep and I'll bring the old man round as soon as he's done
the wards."

It seemed hours before anyone came to Philip. His head felt as if it would
split, anguish rent his limbs, and he was afraid he was going to cry. Then
there was a knock at the door and Griffiths, healthy, strong, and
cheerful, came in.

"Here's Doctor Deacon," he said.

The physician stepped forward, an elderly man with a bland manner, whom
Philip knew only by sight. A few questions, a brief examination, and the
diagnosis.

"What d'you make it?" he asked Griffiths, smiling.

"Influenza."

"Quite right."

Doctor Deacon looked round the dingy lodging-house room.

"Wouldn't you like to go to the hospital? They'll put you in a private
ward, and you can be better looked after than you can here."

"I'd rather stay where I am," said Philip.

He did not want to be disturbed, and he was always shy of new
surroundings. He did not fancy nurses fussing about him, and the dreary
cleanliness of the hospital.

"I can look after him, sir," said Griffiths at once.

"Oh, very well."

He wrote a prescription, gave instructions, and left.

"Now you've got to do exactly as I tell you," said Griffiths. "I'm
day-nurse and night-nurse all in one."

"It's very kind of you, but I shan't want anything," said Philip.

Griffiths put his hand on Philip's forehead, a large cool, dry hand, and
the touch seemed to him good.

"I'm just going to take this round to the dispensary to have it made up,
and then I'll come back."

In a little while he brought the medicine and gave Philip a dose. Then he
went upstairs to fetch his books.

"You won't mind my working in your room this afternoon, will you?" he
said, when he came down. "I'll leave the door open so that you can give me
a shout if you want anything."

Later in the day Philip, awaking from an uneasy doze, heard voices in his
sitting-room. A friend had come in to see Griffiths.

"I say, you'd better not come in tonight," he heard Griffiths saying.

And then a minute or two afterwards someone else entered the room and
expressed his surprise at finding Griffiths there. Philip heard him
explain.

"I'm looking after a second year's man who's got these rooms. The wretched
blighter's down with influenza. No whist tonight, old man."

Presently Griffiths was left alone and Philip called him.

"I say, you're not putting off a party tonight, are you?" he asked.

"Not on your account. I must work at my surgery."

"Don't put it off. I shall be all right. You needn't bother about me."

"That's all right."

Philip grew worse. As the night came on he became slightly delirious, but
towards morning he awoke from a restless sleep. He saw Griffiths get out
of an arm-chair, go down on his knees, and with his fingers put piece
after piece of coal on the fire. He was in pyjamas and a dressing-gown.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

"Did I wake you up? I tried to make up the fire without making a row."

"Why aren't you in bed? What's the time?"

"About five. I thought I'd better sit up with you tonight. I brought an
arm-chair in as I thought if I put a mattress down I should sleep so
soundly that I shouldn't hear you if you wanted anything."

"I wish you wouldn't be so good to me," groaned Philip. "Suppose you catch
it?"

"Then you shall nurse me, old man," said Griffiths, with a laugh.

In the morning Griffiths drew up the blind. He looked pale and tired after
his night's watch, but was full of spirits.

"Now, I'm going to wash you," he said to Philip cheerfully.

"I can wash myself," said Philip, ashamed.

"Nonsense. If you were in the small ward a nurse would wash you, and I can
do it just as well as a nurse."

Philip, too weak and wretched to resist, allowed Griffiths to wash his
hands and face, his feet, his chest and back. He did it with charming
tenderness, carrying on meanwhile a stream of friendly chatter; then he
changed the sheet just as they did at the hospital, shook out the pillow,
and arranged the bed-clothes.

"I should like Sister Arthur to see me. It would make her sit up. Deacon's
coming in to see you early."

"I can't imagine why you should be so good to me," said Philip.

"It's good practice for me. It's rather a lark having a patient."

Griffiths gave him his breakfast and went off to get dressed and have
something to eat. A few minutes before ten he came back with a bunch of
grapes and a few flowers.

"You are awfully kind," said Philip.

He was in bed for five days.

Norah and Griffiths nursed him between them. Though Griffiths was the same
age as Philip he adopted towards him a humorous, motherly attitude. He was
a thoughtful fellow, gentle and encouraging; but his greatest quality was
a vitality which seemed to give health to everyone with whom he came in
contact. Philip was unused to the petting which most people enjoy from
mothers or sisters and he was deeply touched by the feminine tenderness of
this strong young man. Philip grew better. Then Griffiths, sitting idly in
Philip's room, amused him with gay stories of amorous adventure. He was a
flirtatious creature, capable of carrying on three or four affairs at a
time; and his account of the devices he was forced to in order to keep out
of difficulties made excellent hearing. He had a gift for throwing a
romantic glamour over everything that happened to him. He was crippled
with debts, everything he had of any value was pawned, but he managed
always to be cheerful, extravagant, and generous. He was the adventurer by
nature. He loved people of doubtful occupations and shifty purposes; and
his acquaintance among the riff-raff that frequents the bars of London was
enormous. Loose women, treating him as a friend, told him the troubles,
difficulties, and successes of their lives; and card-sharpers, respecting
his impecuniosity, stood him dinners and lent him five-pound notes. He was
ploughed in his examinations time after time; but he bore this cheerfully,
and submitted with such a charming grace to the parental expostulations
that his father, a doctor in practice at Leeds, had not the heart to be
seriously angry with him.

"I'm an awful fool at books," he said cheerfully, "but I CAN'T work."

Life was much too jolly. But it was clear that when he had got through the
exuberance of his youth, and was at last qualified, he would be a
tremendous success in practice. He would cure people by the sheer charm of
his manner.

Philip worshipped him as at school he had worshipped boys who were tall
and straight and high of spirits. By the time he was well they were fast
friends, and it was a peculiar satisfaction to Philip that Griffiths
seemed to enjoy sitting in his little parlour, wasting Philip's time with
his amusing chatter and smoking innumerable cigarettes. Philip took him
sometimes to the tavern off Regent Street. Hayward found him stupid, but
Lawson recognised his charm and was eager to paint him; he was a
picturesque figure with his blue eyes, white skin, and curly hair. Often
they discussed things he knew nothing about, and then he sat quietly, with
a good-natured smile on his handsome face, feeling quite rightly that his
presence was sufficient contribution to the entertainment of the company.
When he discovered that Macalister was a stockbroker he was eager for
tips; and Macalister, with his grave smile, told him what fortunes he
could have made if he had bought certain stock at certain times. It made
Philip's mouth water, for in one way and another he was spending more than
he had expected, and it would have suited him very well to make a little
money by the easy method Macalister suggested.

"Next time I hear of a really good thing I'll let you know," said the
stockbroker. "They do come along sometimes. It's only a matter of biding
one's time."

Philip could not help thinking how delightful it would be to make fifty
pounds, so that he could give Norah the furs she so badly needed for the
winter. He looked at the shops in Regent Street and picked out the
articles he could buy for the money. She deserved everything. She made his
life very happy

LXIX

One afternoon, when he went back to his rooms from the hospital to wash
and tidy himself before going to tea as usual with Norah, as he let
himself in with his latch-key, his landlady opened the door for him.

"There's a lady waiting to see you," she said.

"Me?" exclaimed Philip.

He was surprised. It would only be Norah, and he had no idea what had
brought her.

"I shouldn't 'ave let her in, only she's been three times, and she seemed
that upset at not finding you, so I told her she could wait."

He pushed past the explaining landlady and burst into the room. His heart
turned sick. It was Mildred. She was sitting down, but got up hurriedly as
he came in. She did not move towards him nor speak. He was so surprised
that he did not know what he was saying.

"What the hell d'you want?" he asked.

She did not answer, but began to cry. She did not put her hands to her
eyes, but kept them hanging by the side of her body. She looked like a
housemaid applying for a situation. There was a dreadful humility in her
bearing. Philip did not know what feelings came over him. He had a sudden
impulse to turn round and escape from the room.

"I didn't think I'd ever see you again," he said at last.

"I wish I was dead," she moaned.

Philip left her standing where she was. He could only think at the moment
of steadying himself. His knees were shaking. He looked at her, and he
groaned in despair.

"What's the matter?" he said.

"He's left me--Emil."

Philip's heart bounded. He knew then that he loved her as passionately as
ever. He had never ceased to love her. She was standing before him humble
and unresisting. He wished to take her in his arms and cover her
tear-stained face with kisses. Oh, how long the separation had been! He
did not know how he could have endured it.

"You'd better sit down. Let me give you a drink."

He drew the chair near the fire and she sat in it. He mixed her whiskey
and soda, and, sobbing still, she drank it. She looked at him with great,
mournful eyes. There were large black lines under them. She was thinner
and whiter than when last he had seen her.

"I wish I'd married you when you asked me," she said.

Philip did not know why the remark seemed to swell his heart. He could not
keep the distance from her which he had forced upon himself. He put his
hand on her shoulder.

"I'm awfully sorry you're in trouble."

She leaned her head against his bosom and burst into hysterical crying.
Her hat was in the way and she took it off. He had never dreamt that she
was capable of crying like that. He kissed her again and again. It seemed
to ease her a little.

"You were always good to me, Philip," she said. "That's why I knew I could
come to you."

"Tell me what's happened."

"Oh, I can't, I can't," she cried out, breaking away from him.

He sank down on his knees beside her and put his cheek against hers.

"Don't you know that there's nothing you can't tell me? I can never blame
you for anything."

She told him the story little by little, and sometimes she sobbed so much
that he could hardly understand.

"Last Monday week he went up to Birmingham, and he promised to be back on
Thursday, and he never came, and he didn't come on the Friday, so I wrote
to ask what was the matter, and he never answered the letter. And I wrote
and said that if I didn't hear from him by return I'd go up to Birmingham,
and this morning I got a solicitor's letter to say I had no claim on him,
and if I molested him he'd seek the protection of the law."

"But it's absurd," cried Philip. "A man can't treat his wife like that.
Had you had a row?"

"Oh, yes, we'd had a quarrel on the Sunday, and he said he was sick of me,
but he'd said it before, and he'd come back all right. I didn't think he
meant it. He was frightened, because I told him a baby was coming. I kept
it from him as long as I could. Then I had to tell him. He said it was my
fault, and I ought to have known better. If you'd only heard the things he
said to me! But I found out precious quick that he wasn't a gentleman. He
left me without a penny. He hadn't paid the rent, and I hadn't got the
money to pay it, and the woman who kept the house said such things to
me--well, I might have been a thief the way she talked."

"I thought you were going to take a flat."

"That's what he said, but we just took furnished apartments in Highbury.
He was that mean. He said I was extravagant, he didn't give me anything to
be extravagant with."

She had an extraordinary way of mixing the trivial with the important.
Philip was puzzled. The whole thing was incomprehensible.

"No man could be such a blackguard."

"You don't know him. I wouldn't go back to him now not if he was to come
and ask me on his bended knees. I was a fool ever to think of him. And he
wasn't earning the money he said he was. The lies he told me!"

Philip thought for a minute or two. He was so deeply moved by her distress
that he could not think of himself.

"Would you like me to go to Birmingham? I could see him and try to make
things up."

"Oh, there's no chance of that. He'll never come back now, I know him."

"But he must provide for you. He can't get out of that. I don't know
anything about these things, you'd better go and see a solicitor."

"How can I? I haven't got the money."

"I'll pay all that. I'll write a note to my own solicitor, the sportsman
who was my father's executor. Would you like me to come with you now? I
expect he'll still be at his office."

"No, give me a letter to him. I'll go alone."

She was a little calmer now. He sat down and wrote a note. Then he
remembered that she had no money. He had fortunately changed a cheque the
day before and was able to give her five pounds.

"You are good to me, Philip," she said.

"I'm so happy to be able to do something for you."

"Are you fond of me still?"

"Just as fond as ever."

She put up her lips and he kissed her. There was a surrender in the action
which he had never seen in her before. It was worth all the agony he had
suffered.

She went away and he found that she had been there for two hours. He was
extraordinarily happy.

"Poor thing, poor thing," he murmured to himself, his heart glowing with
a greater love than he had ever felt before.

He never thought of Norah at all till about eight o'clock a telegram came.
He knew before opening it that it was from her.

Is anything the matter? Norah.

He did not know what to do nor what to answer. He could fetch her after
the play, in which she was walking on, was over and stroll home with her
as he sometimes did; but his whole soul revolted against the idea of
seeing her that evening. He thought of writing to her, but he could not
bring himself to address her as usual, dearest Norah. He made up his
mind to telegraph.

Sorry. Could not get away, Philip.

He visualised her. He was slightly repelled by the ugly little face, with
its high cheekbones and the crude colour. There was a coarseness in her
skin which gave him goose-flesh. He knew that his telegram must be
followed by some action on his part, but at all events it postponed it.

Next day he wired again.

Regret, unable to come. Will write.

Mildred had suggested coming at four in the afternoon, and he would not
tell her that the hour was inconvenient. After all she came first. He
waited for her impatiently. He watched for her at the window and opened
the front-door himself.

"Well? Did you see Nixon?"

"Yes," she answered. "He said it wasn't any good. Nothing's to be done. I
must just grin and bear it."

"But that's impossible," cried Philip.

She sat down wearily.

"Did he give any reasons?" he asked.

She gave him a crumpled letter.

"There's your letter, Philip. I never took it. I couldn't tell you
yesterday, I really couldn't. Emil didn't marry me. He couldn't. He had a
wife already and three children."

Philip felt a sudden pang of jealousy and anguish. It was almost more than
he could bear.

"That's why I couldn't go back to my aunt. There's no one I can go to but
you."

"What made you go away with him?" Philip asked, in a low voice which he
struggled to make firm.

"I don't know. I didn't know he was a married man at first, and when he
told me I gave him a piece of my mind. And then I didn't see him for
months, and when he came to the shop again and asked me I don't know what
came over me. I felt as if I couldn't help it. I had to go with him."

"Were you in love with him?"

"I don't know. I couldn't hardly help laughing at the things he said. And
there was something about him--he said I'd never regret it, he promised to
give me seven pounds a week--he said he was earning fifteen, and it was
all a lie, he wasn't. And then I was sick of going to the shop every
morning, and I wasn't getting on very well with my aunt; she wanted to
treat me as a servant instead of a relation, said I ought to do my own
room, and if I didn't do it nobody was going to do it for me. Oh, I wish
I hadn't. But when he came to the shop and asked me I felt I couldn't help
it."

Philip moved away from her. He sat down at the table and buried his face
in his hands. He felt dreadfully humiliated.

"You're not angry with me, Philip?" she asked piteously.

"No," he answered, looking up but away from her, "only I'm awfully hurt."

"Why?"

"You see, I was so dreadfully in love with you. I did everything I could
to make you care for me. I thought you were incapable of loving anyone.
It's so horrible to know that you were willing to sacrifice everything for
that bounder. I wonder what you saw in him."

"I'm awfully sorry, Philip. I regretted it bitterly afterwards, I promise
you that."

He thought of Emil Miller, with his pasty, unhealthy look, his shifty blue
eyes, and the vulgar smartness of his appearance; he always wore bright
red knitted waistcoats. Philip sighed. She got up and went to him. She put
her arm round his neck.

"I shall never forget that you offered to marry me, Philip."

He took her hand and looked up at her. She bent down and kissed him.

"Philip, if you want me still I'll do anything you like now. I know you're
a gentleman in every sense of the word."

His heart stood still. Her words made him feel slightly sick.

"It's awfully good of you, but I couldn't."

"Don't you care for me any more?"

"Yes, I love you with all my heart."

"Then why shouldn't we have a good time while we've got the chance? You
see, it can't matter now"

He released himself from her.

"You don't understand. I've been sick with love for you ever since I saw
you, but now--that man. I've unfortunately got a vivid imagination. The
thought of it simply disgusts me."

"You are funny," she said.

He took her hand again and smiled at her.

"You mustn't think I'm not grateful. I can never thank you enough, but you
see, it's just stronger than I am."

"You are a good friend, Philip."

They went on talking, and soon they had returned to the familiar
companionship of old days. It grew late. Philip suggested that they should
dine together and go to a music-hall. She wanted some persuasion, for she
had an idea of acting up to her situation, and felt instinctively that it
did not accord with her distressed condition to go to a place of
entertainment. At last Philip asked her to go simply to please him, and
when she could look upon it as an act of self-sacrifice she accepted. She
had a new thoughtfulness which delighted Philip. She asked him to take her
to the little restaurant in Soho to which they had so often been; he was
infinitely grateful to her, because her suggestion showed that happy
memories were attached to it. She grew much more cheerful as dinner
proceeded. The Burgundy from the public house at the corner warmed her
heart, and she forgot that she ought to preserve a dolorous countenance.
Philip thought it safe to speak to her of the future.

"I suppose you haven't got a brass farthing, have you?" he asked, when an
opportunity presented itself.

"Only what you gave me yesterday, and I had to give the landlady three
pounds of that."

"Well, I'd better give you a tenner to go on with. I'll go and see my
solicitor and get him to write to Miller. We can make him pay up
something, I'm sure. If we can get a hundred pounds out of him it'll carry
you on till after the baby comes."

"I wouldn't take a penny from him. I'd rather starve."

"But it's monstrous that he should leave you in the lurch like this."

"I've got my pride to consider."

It was a little awkward for Philip. He needed rigid economy to make his
own money last till he was qualified, and he must have something over to
keep him during the year he intended to spend as house physician and house
surgeon either at his own or at some other hospital. But Mildred had told
him various stories of Emil's meanness, and he was afraid to remonstrate
with her in case she accused him too of want of generosity.

"I wouldn't take a penny piece from him. I'd sooner beg my bread. I'd have
seen about getting some work to do long before now, only it wouldn't be
good for me in the state I'm in. You have to think of your health, don't
you?"

"You needn't bother about the present," said Philip. "I can let you have
all you want till you're fit to work again."

"I knew I could depend on you. I told Emil he needn't think I hadn't got
somebody to go to. I told him you was a gentleman in every sense of the
word."

By degrees Philip learned how the separation had come about. It appeared
that the fellow's wife had discovered the adventure he was engaged in
during his periodical visits to London, and had gone to the head of the
firm that employed him. She threatened to divorce him, and they announced
that they would dismiss him if she did. He was passionately devoted to his
children and could not bear the thought of being separated from them. When
he had to choose between his wife and his mistress he chose his wife. He
had been always anxious that there should be no child to make the
entanglement more complicated; and when Mildred, unable longer to conceal
its approach, informed him of the fact, he was seized with panic. He
picked a quarrel and left her without more ado.

"When d'you expect to be confined?" asked Philip.

"At the beginning of March."

"Three months."

It was necessary to discuss plans. Mildred declared she would not remain
in the rooms at Highbury, and Philip thought it more convenient too that
she should be nearer to him. He promised to look for something next day.
She suggested the Vauxhall Bridge Road as a likely neighbourhood.

"And it would be near for afterwards," she said.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I should only be able to stay there about two months or a little
more, and then I should have to go into a house. I know a very respectable
place, where they have a most superior class of people, and they take you
for four guineas a week and no extras. Of course the doctor's extra, but
that's all. A friend of mine went there, and the lady who keeps it is a
thorough lady. I mean to tell her that my husband's an officer in India
and I've come to London for my baby, because it's better for my health."

It seemed extraordinary to Philip to hear her talking in this way. With
her delicate little features and her pale face she looked cold and
maidenly. When he thought of the passions that burnt within her, so
unexpected, his heart was strangely troubled. His pulse beat quickly.

LXX

Philip expected to find a letter from Norah when he got back to his rooms,
but there was nothing; nor did he receive one the following morning. The
silence irritated and at the same time alarmed him. They had seen one
another every day he had been in London since the previous June; and it
must seem odd to her that he should let two days go by without visiting
her or offering a reason for his absence; he wondered whether by an
unlucky chance she had seen him with Mildred. He could not bear to think
that she was hurt or unhappy, and he made up his mind to call on her that
afternoon. He was almost inclined to reproach her because he had allowed
himself to get on such intimate terms with her. The thought of continuing
them filled him with disgust.

He found two rooms for Mildred on the second floor of a house in the
Vauxhall Bridge Road. They were noisy, but he knew that she liked the
rattle of traffic under her windows.

"I don't like a dead and alive street where you don't see a soul pass all
day," she said. "Give me a bit of life."

Then he forced himself to go to Vincent Square. He was sick with
apprehension when he rang the bell. He had an uneasy sense that he was
treating Norah badly; he dreaded reproaches; he knew she had a quick
temper, and he hated scenes: perhaps the best way would be to tell her
frankly that Mildred had come back to him and his love for her was as
violent as it had ever been; he was very sorry, but he had nothing to
offer Norah any more. Then he thought of her anguish, for he knew she
loved him; it had flattered him before, and he was immensely grateful; but
now it was horrible. She had not deserved that he should inflict pain upon
her. He asked himself how she would greet him now, and as he walked up the
stairs all possible forms of her behaviour flashed across his mind. He
knocked at the door. He felt that he was pale, and wondered how to conceal
his nervousness.

She was writing away industriously, but she sprang to her feet as he
entered.

"I recognised your step," she cried. "Where have you been hiding yourself,
you naughty boy?"

She came towards him joyfully and put her arms round his neck. She was
delighted to see him. He kissed her, and then, to give himself
countenance, said he was dying for tea. She bustled the fire to make the
kettle boil.

"I've been awfully busy," he said lamely.

She began to chatter in her bright way, telling him of a new commission
she had to provide a novelette for a firm which had not hitherto employed
her. She was to get fifteen guineas for it.

"It's money from the clouds. I'll tell you what we'll do, we'll stand
ourselves a little jaunt. Let's go and spend a day at Oxford, shall we?
I'd love to see the colleges."

He looked at her to see whether there was any shadow of reproach in her
eyes; but they were as frank and merry as ever: she was overjoyed to see
him. His heart sank. He could not tell her the brutal truth. She made some
toast for him, and cut it into little pieces, and gave it him as though he
were a child.

"Is the brute fed?" she asked.

He nodded, smiling; and she lit a cigarette for him. Then, as she loved to
do, she came and sat on his knees. She was very light. She leaned back in
his arms with a sigh of delicious happiness.

"Say something nice to me," she murmured.

"What shall I say?"

"You might by an effort of imagination say that you rather liked me."

"You know I do that."

He had not the heart to tell her then. He would give her peace at all
events for that day, and perhaps he might write to her. That would be
easier. He could not bear to think of her crying. She made him kiss her,
and as he kissed her he thought of Mildred and Mildred's pale, thin lips.
The recollection of Mildred remained with him all the time, like an
incorporated form, but more substantial than a shadow; and the sight
continually distracted his attention.

"You're very quiet today," Norah said.

Her loquacity was a standing joke between them, and he answered:

"You never let me get a word in, and I've got out of the habit of
talking."

"But you're not listening, and that's bad manners."

He reddened a little, wondering whether she had some inkling of his
secret; he turned away his eyes uneasily. The weight of her irked him this
afternoon, and he did not want her to touch him.

"My foot's gone to sleep," he said.

"I'm so sorry," she cried, jumping up. "I shall have to bant if I can't
break myself of this habit of sitting on gentlemen's knees."

He went through an elaborate form of stamping his foot and walking about.
Then he stood in front of the fire so that she should not resume her
position. While she talked he thought that she was worth ten of Mildred;
she amused him much more and was jollier to talk to; she was cleverer, and
she had a much nicer nature. She was a good, brave, honest little woman;
and Mildred, he thought bitterly, deserved none of these epithets. If he
had any sense he would stick to Norah, she would make him much happier
than he would ever be with Mildred: after all she loved him, and Mildred
was only grateful for his help. But when all was said the important thing
was to love rather than to be loved; and he yearned for Mildred with his
whole soul. He would sooner have ten minutes with her than a whole
afternoon with Norah, he prized one kiss of her cold lips more than all
Norah could give him.

"I can't help myself," he thought. "I've just got her in my bones."

He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and
grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with the one than
happiness with the other.

When he got up to go Norah said casually:

"Well, I shall see you tomorrow, shan't I?"

"Yes," he answered.

He knew that he would not be able to come, since he was going to help
Mildred with her moving, but he had not the courage to say so. He made up
his mind that he would send a wire. Mildred saw the rooms in the morning,
was satisfied with them, and after luncheon Philip went up with her to
Highbury. She had a trunk for her clothes and another for the various odds
and ends, cushions, lampshades, photograph frames, with which she had
tried to give the apartments a home-like air; she had two or three large
cardboard boxes besides, but in all there was no more than could be put on
the roof of a four-wheeler. As they drove through Victoria Street Philip
sat well back in the cab in case Norah should happen to be passing. He had
not had an opportunity to telegraph and could not do so from the post
office in the Vauxhall Bridge Road, since she would wonder what he was
doing in that neighbourhood; and if he was there he could have no excuse
for not going into the neighbouring square where she lived. He made up his
mind that he had better go in and see her for half an hour; but the
necessity irritated him: he was angry with Norah, because she forced him
to vulgar and degrading shifts. But he was happy to be with Mildred. It
amused him to help her with the unpacking; and he experienced a charming
sense of possession in installing her in these lodgings which he had found
and was paying for. He would not let her exert herself. It was a pleasure
to do things for her, and she had no desire to do what somebody else
seemed desirous to do for her. He unpacked her clothes and put them away.
She was not proposing to go out again, so he got her slippers and took off
her boots. It delighted him to perform menial offices.

"You do spoil me," she said, running her fingers affectionately through
his hair, while he was on his knees unbuttoning her boots.

He took her hands and kissed them.

"It is nipping to have you here."

He arranged the cushions and the photograph frames. She had several jars
of green earthenware.

"I'll get you some flowers for them," he said.

He looked round at his work proudly.

"As I'm not going out any more I think I'll get into a tea-gown," she
said. "Undo me behind, will you?"

She turned round as unconcernedly as though he were a woman. His sex meant
nothing to her. But his heart was filled with gratitude for the intimacy
her request showed. He undid the hooks and eyes with clumsy fingers.

"That first day I came into the shop I never thought I'd be doing this for
you now," he said, with a laugh which he forced.

"Somebody must do it," she answered.

She went into the bed-room and slipped into a pale blue tea-gown decorated
with a great deal of cheap lace. Then Philip settled her on a sofa and
made tea for her.

"I'm afraid I can't stay and have it with you," he said regretfully. "I've
got a beastly appointment. But I shall be back in half an hour."

He wondered what he should say if she asked him what the appointment was,
but she showed no curiosity. He had ordered dinner for the two of them
when he took the rooms, and proposed to spend the evening with her
quietly. He was in such a hurry to get back that he took a tram along the
Vauxhall Bridge Road. He thought he had better break the fact to Norah at
once that he could not stay more than a few minutes.

"I say, I've got only just time to say how d'you do," he said, as soon as
he got into her rooms. "I'm frightfully busy."

Her face fell.

"Why, what's the matter?"

It exasperated him that she should force him to tell lies, and he knew
that he reddened when he answered that there was a demonstration at the
hospital which he was bound to go to. He fancied that she looked as though
she did not believe him, and this irritated him all the more.

"Oh, well, it doesn't matter," she said. "I shall have you all tomorrow."

He looked at her blankly. It was Sunday, and he had been looking forward
to spending the day with Mildred. He told himself that he must do that in
common decency; he could not leave her by herself in a strange house.

"I'm awfully sorry, I'm engaged tomorrow."

He knew this was the beginning of a scene which he would have given
anything to avoid. The colour on Norah's cheeks grew brighter.

"But I've asked the Gordons to lunch"--they were an actor and his wife who
were touring the provinces and in London for Sunday--"I told you about it
a week ago."

"I'm awfully sorry, I forgot." He hesitated. "I'm afraid I can't possibly
come. Isn't there somebody else you can get?"

"What are you doing tomorrow then?"

"I wish you wouldn't cross-examine me."

"Don't you want to tell me?"

"I don't in the least mind telling you, but it's rather annoying to be
forced to account for all one's movements."

Norah suddenly changed. With an effort of self-control she got the better
of her temper, and going up to him took his hands.

"Don't disappoint me tomorrow, Philip, I've been looking forward so much
to spending the day with you. The Gordons want to see you, and we'll have
such a jolly time."

"I'd love to if I could."

"I'm not very exacting, am I? I don't often ask you to do anything that's
a bother. Won't you get out of your horrid engagement--just this once?"

"I'm awfully sorry, I don't see how I can," he replied sullenly.

"Tell me what it is," she said coaxingly.

He had had time to invent something. "Griffiths' two sisters are up for
the week-end and we're taking them out."

"Is that all?" she said joyfully. "Griffiths can so easily get another
man."

He wished he had thought of something more urgent than that. It was a
clumsy lie.

"No, I'm awfully sorry, I can't--I've promised and I mean to keep my
promise."

"But you promised me too. Surely I come first."

"I wish you wouldn't persist," he said.

She flared up.

"You won't come because you don't want to. I don't know what you've been
doing the last few days, you've been quite different."

He looked at his watch.

"I'm afraid I'll have to be going," he said.

"You won't come tomorrow?"

"No."

"In that case you needn't trouble to come again," she cried, losing her
temper for good.

"That's just as you like," he answered.

"Don't let me detain you any longer," she added ironically.

He shrugged his shoulders and walked out. He was relieved that it had gone
no worse. There had been no tears. As he walked along he congratulated
himself on getting out of the affair so easily. He went into Victoria
Street and bought a few flowers to take in to Mildred.

The little dinner was a great success. Philip had sent in a small pot of
caviare, which he knew she was very fond of, and the landlady brought them
up some cutlets with vegetables and a sweet. Philip had ordered Burgundy,
which was her favourite wine. With the curtains drawn, a bright fire, and
one of Mildred's shades on the lamp, the room was cosy.

"It's really just like home," smiled Philip.

"I might be worse off, mightn't I?" she answered.

When they finished, Philip drew two arm-chairs in front of the fire, and
they sat down. He smoked his pipe comfortably. He felt happy and generous.

"What would you like to do tomorrow?" he asked.

"Oh, I'm going to Tulse Hill. You remember the manageress at the shop,
well, she's married now, and she's asked me to go and spend the day with
her. Of course she thinks I'm married too."

Philip's heart sank.

"But I refused an invitation so that I might spend Sunday with you."

He thought that if she loved him she would say that in that case she would
stay with him. He knew very well that Norah would not have hesitated.

"Well, you were a silly to do that. I've promised to go for three weeks
and more."

"But how can you go alone?"

"Oh, I shall say that Emil's away on business. Her husband's in the glove
trade, and he's a very superior fellow."

Philip was silent, and bitter feelings passed through his heart. She gave
him a sidelong glance.

"You don't grudge me a little pleasure, Philip? You see, it's the last
time I shall be able to go anywhere for I don't know how long, and I had
promised."

He took her hand and smiled.

"No, darling, I want you to have the best time you can. I only want you to
be happy."

There was a little book bound in blue paper lying open, face downwards, on
the sofa, and Philip idly took it up. It was a twopenny novelette, and the
author was Courtenay Paget. That was the name under which Norah wrote.

"I do like his books," said Mildred. "I read them all. They're so
refined."

He remembered what Norah had said of herself.

"I have an immense popularity among kitchen-maids. They think me so
genteel."

LXXI

Philip, in return for Griffiths' confidences, had told him the details of
his own complicated amours, and on Sunday morning, after breakfast when
they sat by the fire in their dressing-gowns and smoked, he recounted the
scene of the previous day. Griffiths congratulated him because he had got
out of his difficulties so easily.

"It's the simplest thing in the world to have an affair with a woman, he
remarked sententiously, "but it's a devil of a nuisance to get out of it."

Philip felt a little inclined to pat himself on the back for his skill in
managing the business. At all events he was immensely relieved. He thought
of Mildred enjoying herself in Tulse Hill, and he found in himself a real
satisfaction because she was happy. It was an act of self-sacrifice on his
part that he did not grudge her pleasure even though paid for by his own
disappointment, and it filled his heart with a comfortable glow.

But on Monday morning he found on his table a letter from Norah. She
wrote:

Dearest,

I'm sorry I was cross on Saturday. Forgive me and come to tea in the
afternoon as usual. I love you.
                                                  Your Norah.

His heart sank, and he did not know what to do. He took the note to
Griffiths and showed it to him.

"You'd better leave it unanswered," said he.

"Oh, I can't," cried Philip. "I should be miserable if I thought of her
waiting and waiting. You don't know what it is to be sick for the
postman's knock. I do, and I can't expose anybody else to that torture."

"My dear fellow, one can't break that sort of affair off without somebody
suffering. You must just set your teeth to that. One thing is, it doesn't
last very long."

Philip felt that Norah had not deserved that he should make her suffer;
and what did Griffiths know about the degrees of anguish she was capable
of? He remembered his own pain when Mildred had told him she was going to
be married. He did not want anyone to experience what he had experienced
then.

"If you're so anxious not to give her pain, go back to her," said
Griffiths.

"I can't do that."

He got up and walked up and down the room nervously. He was angry with
Norah because she had not let the matter rest. She must have seen that he
had no more love to give her. They said women were so quick at seeing
those things.

"You might help me," he said to Griffiths.

"My dear fellow, don't make such a fuss about it. People do get over these
things, you know. She probably isn't so wrapped up in you as you think,
either. One's always rather apt to exaggerate the passion one's inspired
other people with."

He paused and looked at Philip with amusement.

"Look here, there's only one thing you can do. Write to her, and tell her
the thing's over. Put it so that there can be no mistake about it. It'll
hurt her, but it'll hurt her less if you do the thing brutally than if you
try half-hearted ways."

Philip sat down and wrote the following letter:

My dear Norah,

I am sorry to make you unhappy, but I think we had better let things
remain where we left them on Saturday. I don't think there's any use in
letting these things drag on when they've ceased to be amusing. You told
me to go and I went. I do not propose to come back. Good-bye.
                                                   Philip Carey.

He showed the letter to Griffiths and asked him what he thought of it.
Griffiths read it and looked at Philip with twinkling eyes. He did not say
what he felt.

"I think that'll do the trick," he said.

Philip went out and posted it. He passed an uncomfortable morning, for he
imagined with great detail what Norah would feel when she received his
letter. He tortured himself with the thought of her tears. But at the same
time he was relieved. Imagined grief was more easy to bear than grief
seen, and he was free now to love Mildred with all his soul. His heart
leaped at the thought of going to see her that afternoon, when his day's
work at the hospital was over.

When as usual he went back to his rooms to tidy himself, he had no sooner
put the latch-key in his door than he heard a voice behind him.

"May I come in? I've been waiting for you for half an hour."

It was Norah. He felt himself blush to the roots of his hair. She spoke
gaily. There was no trace of resentment in her voice and nothing to
indicate that there was a rupture between them. He felt himself cornered.
He was sick with fear, but he did his best to smile.

"Yes, do," he said.

He opened the door, and she preceded him into his sitting-room. He was
nervous and, to give himself countenance, offered her a cigarette and lit
one for himself. She looked at him brightly.

"Why did you write me such a horrid letter, you naughty boy? If I'd taken
it seriously it would have made me perfectly wretched."

"It was meant seriously," he answered gravely.

"Don't be so silly. I lost my temper the other day, and I wrote and
apologised. You weren't satisfied, so I've come here to apologise again.
After all, you're your own master and I have no claims upon you. I don't
want you to do anything you don't want to."

She got up from the chair in which she was sitting and went towards him
impulsively, with outstretched hands.

"Let's make friends again, Philip. I'm so sorry if I offended you."

He could not prevent her from taking his hands, but he could not look at
her.

"I'm afraid it's too late," he said.

She let herself down on the floor by his side and clasped his knees.

"Philip, don't be silly. I'm quick-tempered too and I can understand that
I hurt you, but it's so stupid to sulk over it. What's the good of making
us both unhappy? It's been so jolly, our friendship." She passed her
fingers slowly over his hand. "I love you, Philip."

He got up, disengaging himself from her, and went to the other side of the
room.

"I'm awfully sorry, I can't do anything. The whole thing's over."

"D'you mean to say you don't love me any more?"

"I'm afraid so."

"You were just looking for an opportunity to throw me over and you took
that one?"

He did not answer. She looked at him steadily for a time which seemed
intolerable. She was sitting on the floor where he had left her, leaning
against the arm-chair. She began to cry quite silently, without trying to
hide her face, and the large tears rolled down her cheeks one after the
other. She did not sob. It was horribly painful to see her. Philip turned
away.

"I'm awfully sorry to hurt you. It's not my fault if I don't love you."

She did not answer. She merely sat there, as though she were overwhelmed,
and the tears flowed down her cheeks. It would have been easier to bear if
she had reproached him. He had thought her temper would get the better of
her, and he was prepared for that. At the back of his mind was a feeling
that a real quarrel, in which each said to the other cruel things, would
in some way be a justification of his behaviour. The time passed. At last
he grew frightened by her silent crying; he went into his bed-room and got
a glass of water; he leaned over her.

"Won't you drink a little? It'll relieve you."

She put her lips listlessly to the glass and drank two or three mouthfuls.
Then in an exhausted whisper she asked him for a handkerchief. She dried
her eyes.

"Of course I knew you never loved me as much as I loved you," she moaned.

"I'm afraid that's always the case," he said. "There's always one who
loves and one who lets himself be loved."

He thought of Mildred, and a bitter pain traversed his heart. Norah did
not answer for a long time.

"I'd been so miserably unhappy, and my life was so hateful," she said at
last.

She did not speak to him, but to herself. He had never heard her before
complain of the life she had led with her husband or of her poverty. He
had always admired the bold front she displayed to the world.

"And then you came along and you were so good to me. And I admired you
because you were clever and it was so heavenly to have someone I could put
my trust in. I loved you. I never thought it could come to an end. And
without any fault of mine at all."

Her tears began to flow again, but now she was more mistress of herself,
and she hid her face in Philip's handkerchief. She tried hard to control
herself.

"Give me some more water," she said.

She wiped her eyes.

"I'm sorry to make such a fool of myself. I was so unprepared."

"I'm awfully sorry, Norah. I want you to know that I'm very grateful for
all you've done for me."

He wondered what it was she saw in him.

"Oh, it's always the same," she sighed, "if you want men to behave well to
you, you must be beastly to them; if you treat them decently they make you
suffer for it."

She got up from the floor and said she must go. She gave Philip a long,
steady look. Then she sighed.

"It's so inexplicable. What does it all mean?"

Philip took a sudden determination.

"I think I'd better tell you, I don't want you to think too badly of me,
I want you to see that I can't help myself. Mildred's come back."

The colour came to her face.

"Why didn't you tell me at once? I deserved that surely."

"I was afraid to."

She looked at herself in the glass and set her hat straight.

"Will you call me a cab," she said. "I don't feel I can walk."

He went to the door and stopped a passing hansom; but when she followed
him into the street he was startled to see how white she was. There was a
heaviness in her movements as though she had suddenly grown older. She
looked so ill that he had not the heart to let her go alone.

"I'll drive back with you if you don't mind."

She did not answer, and he got into the cab. They drove along in silence
over the bridge, through shabby streets in which children, with shrill
cries, played in the road. When they arrived at her door she did not
immediately get out. It seemed as though she could not summon enough
strength to her legs to move.

"I hope you'll forgive me, Norah," he said.

She turned her eyes towards him, and he saw that they were bright again
with tears, but she forced a smile to her lips.

"Poor fellow, you're quite worried about me. You mustn't bother. I don't
blame you. I shall get over it all right."

Lightly and quickly she stroked his face to show him that she bore no
ill-feeling, the gesture was scarcely more than suggested; then she jumped
out of the cab and let herself into her house.

Philip paid the hansom and walked to Mildred's lodgings. There was a
curious heaviness in his heart. He was inclined to reproach himself. But
why? He did not know what else he could have done. Passing a fruiterer's,
he remembered that Mildred was fond of grapes. He was so grateful that he
could show his love for her by recollecting every whim she had.

LXXII

For the next three months Philip went every day to see Mildred. He took
his books with him and after tea worked, while Mildred lay on the sofa
reading novels. Sometimes he would look up and watch her for a minute. A
happy smile crossed his lips. She would feel his eyes upon her.

"Don't waste your time looking at me, silly. Go on with your work," she
said.

"Tyrant," he answered gaily.

He put aside his book when the landlady came in to lay the cloth for
dinner, and in his high spirits he exchanged chaff with her. She was a
little cockney, of middle age, with an amusing humour and a quick tongue.
Mildred had become great friends with her and had given her an elaborate
but mendacious account of the circumstances which had brought her to the
pass she was in. The good-hearted little woman was touched and found no
trouble too great to make Mildred comfortable. Mildred's sense of
propriety had suggested that Philip should pass himself off as her
brother. They dined together, and Philip was delighted when he had ordered
something which tempted Mildred's capricious appetite. It enchanted him to
see her sitting opposite him, and every now and then from sheer joy he
took her hand and pressed it. After dinner she sat in the arm-chair by the
fire, and he settled himself down on the floor beside her, leaning against
her knees, and smoked. Often they did not talk at all, and sometimes
Philip noticed that she had fallen into a doze. He dared not move then in
case he woke her, and he sat very quietly, looking lazily into the fire
and enjoying his happiness.

"Had a nice little nap?" he smiled, when she woke.

"I've not been sleeping," she answered. "I only just closed my eyes."

She would never acknowledge that she had been asleep. She had a phlegmatic
temperament, and her condition did not seriously inconvenience her. She
took a lot of trouble about her health and accepted the advice of anyone
who chose to offer it. She went for a `constitutional' every morning that
it was fine and remained out a definite time. When it was not too cold she
sat in St. James' Park. But the rest of the day she spent quite happily on
her sofa, reading one novel after another or chatting with the landlady;
she had an inexhaustible interest in gossip, and told Philip with abundant
detail the history of the landlady, of the lodgers on the drawing-room
floor, and of the people who lived in the next house on either side. Now
and then she was seized with panic; she poured out her fears to Philip
about the pain of the confinement and was in terror lest she should die;
she gave him a full account of the confinements of the landlady and of the
lady on the drawing-room floor (Mildred did not know her; "I'm one to keep
myself to myself," she said, "I'm not one to go about with anybody.") and
she narrated details with a queer mixture of horror and gusto; but for the
most part she looked forward to the occurrence with equanimity.

"After all, I'm not the first one to have a baby, am I? And the doctor
says I shan't have any trouble. You see, it isn't as if I wasn't well
made."

Mrs. Owen, the owner of the house she was going to when her time came, had
recommended a doctor, and Mildred saw him once a week. He was to charge
fifteen guineas.

"Of course I could have got it done cheaper, but Mrs. Owen strongly
recommended him, and I thought it wasn't worth while to spoil the ship for
a coat of tar."

"If you feel happy and comfortable I don't mind a bit about the expense,"
said Philip.

She accepted all that Philip did for her as if it were the most natural
thing in the world, and on his side he loved to spend money on her: each
five-pound note he gave her caused him a little thrill of happiness and
pride; he gave her a good many, for she was not economical.

"I don't know where the money goes to," she said herself, "it seems to
slip through my fingers like water."

"It doesn't matter," said Philip. "I'm so glad to be able to do anything
I can for you."

She could not sew well and so did not make the necessary things for the
baby; she told Philip it was much cheaper in the end to buy them. Philip
had lately sold one of the mortgages in which his money had been put; and
now, with five hundred pounds in the bank waiting to be invested in
something that could be more easily realised, he felt himself uncommonly
well-to-do. They talked often of the future. Philip was anxious that
Mildred should keep the child with her, but she refused: she had her
living to earn, and it would be more easy to do this if she had not also
to look after a baby. Her plan was to get back into one of the shops of
the company for which she had worked before, and the child could be put
with some decent woman in the country.

"I can find someone who'll look after it well for seven and sixpence a
week. It'll be better for the baby and better for me."

It seemed callous to Philip, but when he tried to reason with her she
pretended to think he was concerned with the expense.

"You needn't worry about that," she said. "I shan't ask YOU to pay for
it."

"You know I don't care how much I pay."

At the bottom of her heart was the hope that the child would be
still-born. She did no more than hint it, but Philip saw that the thought
was there. He was shocked at first; and then, reasoning with himself, he
was obliged to confess that for all concerned such an event was to be
desired.

"It's all very fine to say this and that," Mildred remarked querulously,
"but it's jolly difficult for a girl to earn her living by herself; it
doesn't make it any easier when she's got a baby."

"Fortunately you've got me to fall back on," smiled Philip, taking her
hand.

"You've been good to me, Philip."

"Oh, what rot!"

"You can't say I didn't offer anything in return for what you've done."

"Good heavens, I don't want a return. If I've done anything for you, I've
done it because I love you. You owe me nothing. I don't want you to do
anything unless you love me."

He was a little horrified by her feeling that her body was a commodity
which she could deliver indifferently as an acknowledgment for services
rendered.

"But I do want to, Philip. You've been so good to me."

"Well, it won't hurt for waiting. When you're all right again we'll go for
our little honeymoon."

"You are naughty," she said, smiling.

Mildred expected to be confined early in March, and as soon as she was
well enough she was to go to the seaside for a fortnight: that would give
Philip a chance to work without interruption for his examination; after
that came the Easter holidays, and they had arranged to go to Paris
together. Philip talked endlessly of the things they would do. Paris was
delightful then. They would take a room in a little hotel he knew in the
Latin Quarter, and they would eat in all sorts of charming little
restaurants; they would go to the play, and he would take her to music
halls. It would amuse her to meet his friends. He had talked to her about
Cronshaw, she would see him; and there was Lawson, he had gone to Paris
for a couple of months; and they would go to the Bal Bullier; there were
excursions; they would make trips to Versailles, Chartres, Fontainebleau.

"It'll cost a lot of money," she said.

"Oh, damn the expense. Think how I've been looking forward to it. Don't
you know what it means to me? I've never loved anyone but you. I never
shall."

She listened to his enthusiasm with smiling eyes. He thought he saw in
them a new tenderness, and he was grateful to her. She was much gentler
than she used to be. There was in her no longer the superciliousness which
had irritated him. She was so accustomed to him now that she took no pains
to keep up before him any pretences. She no longer troubled to do her hair
with the old elaboration, but just tied it in a knot; and she left off the
vast fringe which she generally wore: the more careless style suited her.
Her face was so thin that it made her eyes seem very large; there were
heavy lines under them, and the pallor of her cheeks made their colour
more profound. She had a wistful look which was infinitely pathetic. There
seemed to Philip to be in her something of the Madonna. He wished they
could continue in that same way always. He was happier than he had ever
been in his life.

He used to leave her at ten o'clock every night, for she liked to go to
bed early, and he was obliged to put in another couple of hours' work to
make up for the lost evening. He generally brushed her hair for her before
he went. He had made a ritual of the kisses he gave her when he bade her
good-night; first he kissed the palms of her hands (how thin the fingers
were, the nails were beautiful, for she spent much time in manicuring
them,) then he kissed her closed eyes, first the right one and then the
left, and at last he kissed her lips. He went home with a heart
overflowing with love. He longed for an opportunity to gratify the desire
for self-sacrifice which consumed him.

Presently the time came for her to move to the nursing-home where she was
to be confined. Philip was then able to visit her only in the afternoons.
Mildred changed her story and represented herself as the wife of a soldier
who had gone to India to join his regiment, and Philip was introduced to
the mistress of the establishment as her brother-in-law.

"I have to be rather careful what I say," she told him, "as there's
another lady here whose husband's in the Indian Civil."

"I wouldn't let that disturb me if I were you," said Philip. "I'm
convinced that her husband and yours went out on the same boat."

"What boat?" she asked innocently.

"The Flying Dutchman."

Mildred was safely delivered of a daughter, and when Philip was allowed to
see her the child was lying by her side. Mildred was very weak, but
relieved that everything was over. She showed him the baby, and herself
looked at it curiously.

"It's a funny-looking little thing, isn't it? I can't believe it's mine."

It was red and wrinkled and odd. Philip smiled when he looked at it. He
did not quite know what to say; and it embarrassed him because the nurse
who owned the house was standing by his side; and he felt by the way she
was looking at him that, disbelieving Mildred's complicated story, she
thought he was the father.

"What are you going to call her?" asked Philip.

"I can't make up my mind if I shall call her Madeleine or Cecilia."

The nurse left them alone for a few minutes, and Philip bent down and
kissed Mildred on the mouth.

"I'm so glad it's all over happily, darling."

She put her thin arms round his neck.

"You have been a brick to me, Phil dear."

"Now I feel that you're mine at last. I've waited so long for you, my
dear."

They heard the nurse at the door, and Philip hurriedly got up. The nurse
entered. There was a slight smile on her lips.

LXXIII

Three weeks later Philip saw Mildred and her baby off to Brighton. She had
made a quick recovery and looked better than he had ever seen her. She was
going to a boarding-house where she had spent a couple of weekends with
Emil Miller, and had written to say that her husband was obliged to go to
Germany on business and she was coming down with her baby. She got
pleasure out of the stories she invented, and she showed a certain
fertility of invention in the working out of the details. Mildred proposed
to find in Brighton some woman who would be willing to take charge of the
baby. Philip was startled at the callousness with which she insisted on
getting rid of it so soon, but she argued with common sense that the poor
child had much better be put somewhere before it grew used to her. Philip
had expected the maternal instinct to make itself felt when she had had
the baby two or three weeks and had counted on this to help him persuade
her to keep it; but nothing of the sort occurred. Mildred was not unkind
to her baby; she did all that was necessary; it amused her sometimes, and
she talked about it a good deal; but at heart she was indifferent to it.
She could not look upon it as part of herself. She fancied it resembled
its father already. She was continually wondering how she would manage
when it grew older; and she was exasperated with herself for being such a
fool as to have it at all.

"If I'd only known then all I do now," she said.

She laughed at Philip, because he was anxious about its welfare.

"You couldn't make more fuss if you was the father," she said. "I'd like
to see Emil getting into such a stew about it."

Philip's mind was full of the stories he had heard of baby-farming and the
ghouls who ill-treat the wretched children that selfish, cruel parents
have put in their charge.

"Don't be so silly," said Mildred. "That's when you give a woman a sum
down to look after a baby. But when you're going to pay so much a week
it's to their interest to look after it well."

Philip insisted that Mildred should place the child with people who had no
children of their own and would promise to take no other.

"Don't haggle about the price," he said. "I'd rather pay half a guinea a
week than run any risk of the kid being starved or beaten."

"You're a funny old thing, Philip," she laughed.

To him there was something very touching in the child's helplessness. It
was small, ugly, and querulous. Its birth had been looked forward to with
shame and anguish. Nobody wanted it. It was dependent on him, a stranger,
for food, shelter, and clothes to cover its nakedness.

As the train started he kissed Mildred. He would have kissed the baby too,
but he was afraid she would laugh at him.

"You will write to me, darling, won't you? And I shall look forward to
your coming back with oh! such impatience."

"Mind you get through your exam."

He had been working for it industriously, and now with only ten days
before him he made a final effort. He was very anxious to pass, first to
save himself time and expense, for money had been slipping through his
fingers during the last four months with incredible speed; and then
because this examination marked the end of the drudgery: after that the
student had to do with medicine, midwifery, and surgery, the interest of
which was more vivid than the anatomy and physiology with which he had
been hitherto concerned. Philip looked forward with interest to the rest
of the curriculum. Nor did he want to have to confess to Mildred that he
had failed: though the examination was difficult and the majority of
candidates were ploughed at the first attempt, he knew that she would
think less well of him if he did not succeed; she had a peculiarly
humiliating way of showing what she thought.

Mildred sent him a postcard to announce her safe arrival, and he snatched
half an hour every day to write a long letter to her. He had always a
certain shyness in expressing himself by word of mouth, but he found he
could tell her, pen in hand, all sorts of things which it would have made
him feel ridiculous to say. Profiting by the discovery he poured out to
her his whole heart. He had never been able to tell her before how his
adoration filled every part of him so that all his actions, all his
thoughts, were touched with it. He wrote to her of the future, the
happiness that lay before him, and the gratitude which he owed her. He
asked himself (he had often asked himself before but had never put it into
words) what it was in her that filled him with such extravagant delight;
he did not know; he knew only that when she was with him he was happy, and
when she was away from him the world was on a sudden cold and gray; he
knew only that when he thought of her his heart seemed to grow big in his
body so that it was difficult to breathe (as if it pressed against his
lungs) and it throbbed, so that the delight of her presence was almost
pain; his knees shook, and he felt strangely weak as though, not having
eaten, he were tremulous from want of food. He looked forward eagerly to
her answers. He did not expect her to write often, for he knew that
letter-writing came difficultly to her; and he was quite content with the
clumsy little note that arrived in reply to four of his. She spoke of the
boarding-house in which she had taken a room, of the weather and the baby,
told him she had been for a walk on the front with a lady-friend whom she
had met in the boarding-house and who had taken such a fancy to baby, she
was going to the theatre on Saturday night, and Brighton was filling up.
It touched Philip because it was so matter-of-fact. The crabbed style, the
formality of the matter, gave him a queer desire to laugh and to take her
in his arms and kiss her.

He went into the examination with happy confidence. There was nothing in
either of the papers that gave him trouble. He knew that he had done well,
and though the second part of the examination was viva voce and he was
more nervous, he managed to answer the questions adequately. He sent a
triumphant telegram to Mildred when the result was announced.

When he got back to his rooms Philip found a letter from her, saying that
she thought it would be better for her to stay another week in Brighton.
She had found a woman who would be glad to take the baby for seven
shillings a week, but she wanted to make inquiries about her, and she was
herself benefiting so much by the sea-air that she was sure a few days
more would do her no end of good. She hated asking Philip for money, but
would he send some by return, as she had had to buy herself a new hat, she
couldn't go about with her lady-friend always in the same hat, and her
lady-friend was so dressy. Philip had a moment of bitter disappointment.
It took away all his pleasure at getting through his examination.

"If she loved me one quarter as much as I love her she couldn't bear to
stay away a day longer than necessary."

He put the thought away from him quickly; it was pure selfishness; of
course her health was more important than anything else. But he had
nothing to do now; he might spend the week with her in Brighton, and they
could be together all day. His heart leaped at the thought. It would be
amusing to appear before Mildred suddenly with the information that he had
taken a room in the boarding-house. He looked out trains. But he paused.
He was not certain that she would be pleased to see him; she had made
friends in Brighton; he was quiet, and she liked boisterous joviality; he
realised that she amused herself more with other people than with him. It
would torture him if he felt for an instant that he was in the way. He was
afraid to risk it. He dared not even write and suggest that, with nothing
to keep him in town, he would like to spend the week where he could see
her every day. She knew he had nothing to do; if she wanted him to come
she would have asked him to. He dared not risk the anguish he would suffer
if he proposed to come and she made excuses to prevent him.

He wrote to her next day, sent her a five-pound note, and at the end of
his letter said that if she were very nice and cared to see him for the
week-end he would be glad to run down; but she was by no means to alter
any plans she had made. He awaited her answer with impatience. In it she
said that if she had only known before she could have arranged it, but she
had promised to go to a music-hall on the Saturday night; besides, it
would make the people at the boarding-house talk if he stayed there. Why
did he not come on Sunday morning and spend the day? They could lunch at
the Metropole, and she would take him afterwards to see the very superior
lady-like person who was going to take the baby.

Sunday. He blessed the day because it was fine. As the train approached
Brighton the sun poured through the carriage window. Mildred was waiting
for him on the platform.

"How jolly of you to come and meet me!" he cried, as he seized her hands.

"You expected me, didn't you?"

"I hoped you would. I say, how well you're looking."

"It's done me a rare lot of good, but I think I'm wise to stay here as
long as I can. And there are a very nice class of people at the
boarding-house. I wanted cheering up after seeing nobody all these months.
It was dull sometimes."

She looked very smart in her new hat, a large black straw with a great
many inexpensive flowers on it; and round her neck floated a long boa of
imitation swansdown. She was still very thin, and she stooped a little
when she walked (she had always done that,) but her eyes did not seem so
large; and though she never had any colour, her skin had lost the earthy
look it had. They walked down to the sea. Philip, remembering he had not
walked with her for months, grew suddenly conscious of his limp and walked
stiffly in the attempt to conceal it.

"Are you glad to see me?" he asked, love dancing madly in his heart.

"Of course I am. You needn't ask that."

"By the way, Griffiths sends you his love."

"What cheek!"

He had talked to her a great deal of Griffiths. He had told her how
flirtatious he was and had amused her often with the narration of some
adventure which Griffiths under the seal of secrecy had imparted to him.
Mildred had listened, with some pretence of disgust sometimes, but
generally with curiosity; and Philip, admiringly, had enlarged upon his
friend's good looks and charm.

"I'm sure you'll like him just as much as I do. He's so jolly and amusing,
and he's such an awfully good sort."

Philip told her how, when they were perfect strangers, Griffiths had
nursed him through an illness; and in the telling Griffiths'
self-sacrifice lost nothing.

"You can't help liking him," said Philip.

"I don't like good-looking men," said Mildred. "They're too conceited for
me."

"He wants to know you. I've talked to him about you an awful lot."

"What have you said?" asked Mildred.

Philip had no one but Griffiths to talk to of his love for Mildred, and
little by little had told him the whole story of his connection with her.
He described her to him fifty times. He dwelt amorously on every detail of
her appearance, and Griffiths knew exactly how her thin hands were shaped
and how white her face was, and he laughed at Philip when he talked of the
charm of her pale, thin lips.

"By Jove, I'm glad I don't take things so badly as that," he said. "Life
wouldn't be worth living."

Philip smiled. Griffiths did not know the delight of being so madly in
love that it was like meat and wine and the air one breathed and whatever
else was essential to existence. Griffiths knew that Philip had looked
after the girl while she was having her baby and was now going away with
her.

"Well, I must say you've deserved to get something," he remarked. "It must
have cost you a pretty penny. It's lucky you can afford it."

"I can't," said Philip. "But what do I care!"

Since it was early for luncheon, Philip and Mildred sat in one of the
shelters on the parade, sunning themselves, and watched the people pass.
There were the Brighton shop-boys who walked in twos and threes, swinging
their canes, and there were the Brighton shop-girls who tripped along in
giggling bunches. They could tell the people who had come down from London
for the day; the keen air gave a fillip to their weariness. There were
many Jews, stout ladies in tight satin dresses and diamonds, little
corpulent men with a gesticulative manner. There were middle-aged
gentlemen spending a week-end in one of the large hotels, carefully
dressed; and they walked industriously after too substantial a breakfast
to give themselves an appetite for too substantial a luncheon: they
exchanged the time of day with friends and talked of Dr. Brighton or
London-by-the-Sea. Here and there a well-known actor passed, elaborately
unconscious of the attention he excited: sometimes he wore patent leather
boots, a coat with an astrakhan collar, and carried a silver-knobbed
stick; and sometimes, looking as though he had come from a day's shooting,
he strolled in knickerbockers, and ulster of Harris tweed, and a tweed hat
on the back of his head. The sun shone on the blue sea, and the blue sea
was trim and neat.

After luncheon they went to Hove to see the woman who was to take charge
of the baby. She lived in a small house in a back street, but it was clean
and tidy. Her name was Mrs. Harding. She was an elderly, stout person,
with gray hair and a red, fleshy face. She looked motherly in her cap, and
Philip thought she seemed kind.

"Won't you find it an awful nuisance to look after a baby?" he asked her.

She explained that her husband was a curate, a good deal older than
herself, who had difficulty in getting permanent work since vicars wanted
young men to assist them; he earned a little now and then by doing locums
when someone took a holiday or fell ill, and a charitable institution gave
them a small pension; but her life was lonely, it would be something to do
to look after a child, and the few shillings a week paid for it would help
her to keep things going. She promised that it should be well fed.

"Quite the lady, isn't she?" said Mildred, when they went away.

They went back to have tea at the Metropole. Mildred liked the crowd and
the band. Philip was tired of talking, and he watched her face as she
looked with keen eyes at the dresses of the women who came in. She had a
peculiar sharpness for reckoning up what things cost, and now and then she
leaned over to him and whispered the result of her meditations.

"D'you see that aigrette there? That cost every bit of seven guineas."

Or: "Look at that ermine, Philip. That's rabbit, that is--that's not
ermine." She laughed triumphantly. "I'd know it a mile off."

Philip smiled happily. He was glad to see her pleasure, and the
ingenuousness of her conversation amused and touched him. The band played
sentimental music.

After dinner they walked down to the station, and Philip took her arm. He
told her what arrangements he had made for their journey to France. She
was to come up to London at the end of the week, but she told him that she
could not go away till the Saturday of the week after that. He had already
engaged a room in a hotel in Paris. He was looking forward eagerly to
taking the tickets.

"You won't mind going second-class, will you? We mustn't be extravagant,
and it'll be all the better if we can do ourselves pretty well when we get
there."

He had talked to her a hundred times of the Quarter. They would wander
through its pleasant old streets, and they would sit idly in the charming
gardens of the Luxembourg. If the weather was fine perhaps, when they had
had enough of Paris, they might go to Fontainebleau. The trees would be
just bursting into leaf. The green of the forest in spring was more
beautiful than anything he knew; it was like a song, and it was like the
happy pain of love. Mildred listened quietly. He turned to her and tried
to look deep into her eyes.

"You do want to come, don't you?" he said.

"Of course I do," she smiled.

"You don't know how I'm looking forward to it. I don't know how I shall
get through the next days. I'm so afraid something will happen to prevent
it. It maddens me sometimes that I can't tell you how much I love you. And
at last, at last..."

He broke off. They reached the station, but they had dawdled on the way,
and Philip had barely time to say good-night. He kissed her quickly and
ran towards the wicket as fast as he could. She stood where he left her.
He was strangely grotesque when he ran.

LXXIV

The following Saturday Mildred returned, and that evening Philip kept her
to himself. He took seats for the play, and they drank champagne at
dinner. It was her first gaiety in London for so long that she enjoyed
everything ingenuously. She cuddled up to Philip when they drove from the
theatre to the room he had taken for her in Pimlico.

"I really believe you're quite glad to see me," he said.

She did not answer, but gently pressed his hand. Demonstrations of
affection were so rare with her that Philip was enchanted.

"I've asked Griffiths to dine with us tomorrow," he told her.

"Oh, I'm glad you've done that. I wanted to meet him."

There was no place of entertainment to take her to on Sunday night, and
Philip was afraid she would be bored if she were alone with him all day.
Griffiths was amusing; he would help them to get through the evening; and
Philip was so fond of them both that he wanted them to know and to like
one another. He left Mildred with the words:

"Only six days more."

They had arranged to dine in the gallery at Romano's on Sunday, because
the dinner was excellent and looked as though it cost a good deal more
than it did. Philip and Mildred arrived first and had to wait some time
for Griffiths.

"He's an unpunctual devil," said Philip. "He's probably making love to one
of his numerous flames."

But presently he appeared. He was a handsome creature, tall and thin; his
head was placed well on the body, it gave him a conquering air which was
attractive; and his curly hair, his bold, friendly blue eyes, his red
mouth, were charming. Philip saw Mildred look at him with appreciation,
and he felt a curious satisfaction. Griffiths greeted them with a smile.

"I've heard a great deal about you," he said to Mildred, as he took her
hand.

"Not so much as I've heard about you," she answered.

"Nor so bad," said. Philip.

"Has he been blackening my character?"

Griffiths laughed, and Philip saw that Mildred noticed how white and
regular his teeth were and how pleasant his smile.

"You ought to feel like old friends," said Philip. "I've talked so much
about you to one another."

Griffiths was in the best possible humour, for, having at length passed
his final examination, he was qualified, and he had just been appointed
house-surgeon at a hospital in the North of London. He was taking up his
duties at the beginning of May and meanwhile was going home for a holiday;
this was his last week in town, and he was determined to get as much
enjoyment into it as he could. He began to talk the gay nonsense which
Philip admired because he could not copy it. There was nothing much in
what he said, but his vivacity gave it point. There flowed from him a
force of life which affected everyone who knew him; it was almost as
sensible as bodily warmth. Mildred was more lively than Philip had ever
known her, and he was delighted to see that his little party was a
success. She was amusing herself enormously. She laughed louder and
louder. She quite forgot the genteel reserve which had become second
nature to her.

Presently Griffiths said:

"I say, it's dreadfully difficult for me to call you Mrs. Miller. Philip
never calls you anything but Mildred."

"I daresay she won't scratch your eyes out if you call her that too,"
laughed Philip.

"Then she must call me Harry."

Philip sat silent while they chattered away and thought how good it was to
see people happy. Now and then Griffiths teased him a little, kindly,
because he was always so serious.

"I believe he's quite fond of you, Philip," smiled Mildred.

"He isn't a bad old thing," answered Griffiths, and taking Philip's hand
he shook it gaily.

It seemed an added charm in Griffiths that he liked Philip. They were all
sober people, and the wine they had drunk went to their heads. Griffiths
became more talkative and so boisterous that Philip, amused, had to beg
him to be quiet. He had a gift for story-telling, and his adventures lost
nothing of their romance and their laughter in his narration. He played in
all of them a gallant, humorous part. Mildred, her eyes shining with
excitement, urged him on. He poured out anecdote after anecdote. When the
lights began to be turned out she was astonished.

"My word, the evening has gone quickly. I thought it wasn't more than half
past nine."

They got up to go and when she said good-bye, she added:

"I'm coming to have tea at Philip's room tomorrow. You might look in if
you can."

"All right," he smiled.

On the way back to Pimlico Mildred talked of nothing but Griffiths. She
was taken with his good looks, his well-cut clothes, his voice, his
gaiety.

"I am glad you like him," said Philip. "D'you remember you were rather
sniffy about meeting him?"

"I think it's so nice of him to be so fond of you, Philip. He is a nice
friend for you to have."

She put up her face to Philip for him to kiss her. It was a thing she did
rarely.

"I have enjoyed myself this evening, Philip. Thank you so much."

"Don't be so absurd," he laughed, touched by her appreciation so that he
felt the moisture come to his eyes.

She opened her door and just before she went in, turned again to Philip.

"Tell Harry I'm madly in love with him," she said.

"All right," he laughed. "Good-night."

Next day, when they were having tea, Griffiths came in. He sank lazily
into an arm-chair. There was something strangely sensual in the slow
movements of his large limbs. Philip remained silent, while the others
chattered away, but he was enjoying himself. He admired them both so much
that it seemed natural enough for them to admire one another. He did not
care if Griffiths absorbed Mildred's attention, he would have her to
himself during the evening: he had something of the attitude of a loving
husband, confident in his wife's affection, who looks on with amusement
while she flirts harmlessly with a stranger. But at half past seven he
looked at his watch and said:

"It's about time we went out to dinner, Mildred."

There was a moment's pause, and Griffiths seemed to be considering.

"Well, I'll be getting along," he said at last. "I didn't know it was so
late."

"Are you doing anything tonight?" asked Mildred.

"No."

There was another silence. Philip felt slightly irritated.

"I'll just go and have a wash," he said, and to Mildred he added: "Would
you like to wash your hands?"

She did not answer him.

"Why don't you come and dine with us?" she said to Griffiths.

He looked at Philip and saw him staring at him sombrely.

"I dined with you last night," he laughed. "I should be in the way."

"Oh, that doesn't matter," insisted Mildred. "Make him come, Philip. He
won't be in the way, will he?"

"Let him come by all means if he'd like to."

"All right, then," said Griffiths promptly. "I'll just go upstairs and
tidy myself."

The moment he left the room Philip turned to Mildred angrily.

"Why on earth did you ask him to dine with us?"

"I couldn't help myself. It would have looked so funny to say nothing when
he said he wasn't doing anything."

"Oh, what rot! And why the hell did you ask him if he was doing anything?"

Mildred's pale lips tightened a little.

"I want a little amusement sometimes. I get tired always being alone with
you."

They heard Griffiths coming heavily down the stairs, and Philip went into
his bed-room to wash. They dined in the neighbourhood in an Italian
restaurant. Philip was cross and silent, but he quickly realised that he
was showing to disadvantage in comparison with Griffiths, and he forced
himself to hide his annoyance. He drank a good deal of wine to destroy the
pain that was gnawing at his heart, and he set himself to talk. Mildred,
as though remorseful for what she had said, did all she could to make
herself pleasant to him. She was kindly and affectionate. Presently Philip
began to think he had been a fool to surrender to a feeling of jealousy.
After dinner when they got into a hansom to drive to a music-hall Mildred,
sitting between the two men, of her own accord gave him her hand. His
anger vanished. Suddenly, he knew not how, he grew conscious that
Griffiths was holding her other hand. The pain seized him again violently,
it was a real physical pain, and he asked himself, panic-stricken, what he
might have asked himself before, whether Mildred and Griffiths were in
love with one another. He could not see anything of the performance on
account of the mist of suspicion, anger, dismay, and wretchedness which
seemed to be before his eyes; but he forced himself to conceal the fact
that anything was the matter; he went on talking and laughing. Then a
strange desire to torture himself seized him, and he got up, saying he
wanted to go and drink something. Mildred and Griffiths had never been
alone together for a moment. He wanted to leave them by themselves.

"I'll come too," said Griffiths. "I've got rather a thirst on."

"Oh, nonsense, you stay and talk to Mildred."

Philip did not know why he said that. He was throwing them together now to
make the pain he suffered more intolerable. He did not go to the bar, but
up into the balcony, from where he could watch them and not be seen. They
had ceased to look at the stage and were smiling into one another's eyes.
Griffiths was talking with his usual happy fluency and Mildred seemed to
hang on his lips. Philip's head began to ache frightfully. He stood there
motionless. He knew he would be in the way if he went back. They were
enjoying themselves without him, and he was suffering, suffering. Time
passed, and now he had an extraordinary shyness about rejoining them. He
knew they had not thought of him at all, and he reflected bitterly that he
had paid for the dinner and their seats in the music-hall. What a fool
they were making of him! He was hot with shame. He could see how happy
they were without him. His instinct was to leave them to themselves and go
home, but he had not his hat and coat, and it would necessitate endless
explanations. He went back. He felt a shadow of annoyance in Mildred's
eyes when she saw him, and his heart sank.

"You've been a devil of a time," said Griffiths, with a smile of welcome.

"I met some men I knew. I've been talking to them, and I couldn't get
away. I thought you'd be all right together."

"I've been enjoying myself thoroughly," said Griffiths. "I don't know
about Mildred."

She gave a little laugh of happy complacency. There was a vulgar sound in
the ring of it that horrified Philip. He suggested that they should go.

"Come on," said Griffiths, "we'll both drive you home."

Philip suspected that she had suggested that arrangement so that she might
not be left alone with him. In the cab he did not take her hand nor did
she offer it, and he knew all the time that she was holding Griffiths'.
His chief thought was that it was all so horribly vulgar. As they drove
along he asked himself what plans they had made to meet without his
knowledge, he cursed himself for having left them alone, he had actually
gone out of his way to enable them to arrange things.

"Let's keep the cab," said Philip, when they reached the house in which
Mildred was lodging. "I'm too tired to walk home."

On the way back Griffiths talked gaily and seemed indifferent to the fact
that Philip answered in monosyllables. Philip felt he must notice that
something was the matter. Philip's silence at last grew too significant to
struggle against, and Griffiths, suddenly nervous, ceased talking. Philip
wanted to say something, but he was so shy he could hardly bring himself
to, and yet the time was passing and the opportunity would be lost. It was
best to get at the truth at once. He forced himself to speak.

"Are you in love with Mildred?" he asked suddenly.

"I?" Griffiths laughed. "Is that what you've been so funny about this
evening? Of course not, my dear old man."

He tried to slip his hand through Philip's arm, but Philip drew himself
away. He knew Griffiths was lying. He could not bring himself to force
Griffiths to tell him that he had not been holding the girl's hand. He
suddenly felt very weak and broken.

"It doesn't matter to you, Harry," he said. "You've got so many
women--don't take her away from me. It means my whole life. I've been so
awfully wretched."

His voice broke, and he could not prevent the sob that was torn from him.
He was horribly ashamed of himself.

"My dear old boy, you know I wouldn't do anything to hurt you. I'm far too
fond of you for that. I was only playing the fool. If I'd known you were
going to take it like that I'd have been more careful."

"Is that true?" asked Philip.

"I don't care a twopenny damn for her. I give you my word of honour."

Philip gave a sigh of relief. The cab stopped at their door.

LXXV

Next day Philip was in a good temper. He was very anxious not to bore
Mildred with too much of his society, and so had arranged that he should
not see her till dinner-time. She was ready when he fetched her, and he
chaffed her for her unwonted punctuality. She was wearing a new dress he
had given her. He remarked on its smartness.

"It'll have to go back and be altered," she said. "The skirt hangs all
wrong."

"You'll have to make the dressmaker hurry up if you want to take it to
Paris with you."

"It'll be ready in time for that."

"Only three more whole days. We'll go over by the eleven o'clock, shall
we?"

"If you like."

He would have her for nearly a month entirely to himself. His eyes rested
on her with hungry adoration. He was able to laugh a little at his own
passion.

"I wonder what it is I see in you," he smiled.

"That's a nice thing to say," she answered.

Her body was so thin that one could almost see her skeleton. Her chest was
as flat as a boy's. Her mouth, with its narrow pale lips, was ugly, and
her skin was faintly green.

"I shall give you Blaud's Pills in quantities when we're away," said
Philip, laughing. "I'm going to bring you back fat and rosy."

"I don't want to get fat," she said.

She did not speak of Griffiths, and presently while they were dining
Philip half in malice, for he felt sure of himself and his power over her,
said:

"It seems to me you were having a great flirtation with Harry last night?"

"I told you I was in love with him," she laughed.

"I'm glad to know that he's not in love with you."

"How d'you know?"

"I asked him."

She hesitated a moment, looking at Philip, and a curious gleam came into
her eyes.

"Would you like to read a letter I had from him this morning?"

She handed him an envelope and Philip recognised Griffiths' bold, legible
writing. There were eight pages. It was well written, frank and charming;
it was the letter of a man who was used to making love to women. He told
Mildred that he loved her passionately, he had fallen in love with her the
first moment he saw her; he did not want to love her, for he knew how fond
Philip was of her, but he could not help himself. Philip was such a dear,
and he was very much ashamed of himself, but it was not his fault, he was
just carried away. He paid her delightful compliments. Finally he thanked
her for consenting to lunch with him next day and said he was dreadfully
impatient to see her. Philip noticed that the letter was dated the night
before; Griffiths must have written it after leaving Philip, and had taken
the trouble to go out and post it when Philip thought he was in bed.

He read it with a sickening palpitation of his heart, but gave no outward
sign of surprise. He handed it back to Mildred with a smile, calmly.

"Did you enjoy your lunch?"

"Rather," she said emphatically.

He felt that his hands were trembling, so he put them under the table.

"You mustn't take Griffiths too seriously. He's just a butterfly, you
know."

She took the letter and looked at it again.

"I can't help it either," she said, in a voice which she tried to make
nonchalant. "I don't know what's come over me."

"It's a little awkward for me, isn't it?" said Philip.

She gave him a quick look.

"You're taking it pretty calmly, I must say."

"What do you expect me to do? Do you want me to tear out my hair in
handfuls?"

"I knew you'd be angry with me."

"The funny thing is, I'm not at all. I ought to have known this would
happen. I was a fool to bring you together. I know perfectly well that
he's got every advantage over me; he's much jollier, and he's very
handsome, he's more amusing, he can talk to you about the things that
interest you."

"I don't know what you mean by that. If I'm not clever I can't help it,
but I'm not the fool you think I am, not by a long way, I can tell you.
You're a bit too superior for me, my young friend."

"D'you want to quarrel with me?" he asked mildly.

"No, but I don't see why you should treat me as if I was I don't know
what."

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend you. I just wanted to talk things over
quietly. We don't want to make a mess of them if we can help it. I saw you
were attracted by him and it seemed to me very natural. The only thing
that really hurts me is that he should have encouraged you. He knew how
awfully keen I was on you. I think it's rather shabby of him to have
written that letter to you five minutes after he told me he didn't care
twopence about you."

"If you think you're going to make me like him any the less by saying
nasty things about him, you're mistaken."

Philip was silent for a moment. He did not know what words he could use to
make her see his point of view. He wanted to speak coolly and
deliberately, but he was in such a turmoil of emotion that he could not
clear his thoughts.

"It's not worth while sacrificing everything for an infatuation that you
know can't last. After all, he doesn't care for anyone more than ten days,
and you're rather cold; that sort of thing doesn't mean very much to you."

"That's what you think."

She made it more difficult for him by adopting a cantankerous tone.

"If you're in love with him you can't help it. I'll just bear it as best
I can. We get on very well together, you and I, and I've not behaved badly
to you, have I? I've always known that you're not in love with me, but you
like me all right, and when we get over to Paris you'll forget about
Griffiths. If you make up your mind to put him out of your thoughts you
won't find it so hard as all that, and I've deserved that you should do
something for me."

She did not answer, and they went on eating their dinner. When the silence
grew oppressive Philip began to talk of indifferent things. He pretended
not to notice that Mildred was inattentive. Her answers were perfunctory,
and she volunteered no remarks of her own. At last she interrupted
abruptly what he was saying:

"Philip, I'm afraid I shan't be able to go away on Saturday. The doctor
says I oughtn't to."

He knew this was not true, but he answered:

"When will you be able to come away?"

She glanced at him, saw that his face was white and rigid, and looked
nervously away. She was at that moment a little afraid of him.

"I may as well tell you and have done with it, I can't come away with you
at all."

"I thought you were driving at that. It's too late to change your mind
now. I've got the tickets and everything."

"You said you didn't wish me to go unless I wanted it too, and I don't."

"I've changed my mind. I'm not going to have any more tricks played with
me. You must come."

"I like you very much, Philip, as a friend. But I can't bear to think of
anything else. I don't like you that way. I couldn't, Philip."

"You were quite willing to a week ago."

"It was different then."

"You hadn't met Griffiths?"

"You said yourself I couldn't help it if I'm in love with him."

Her face was set into a sulky look, and she kept her eyes fixed on her
plate. Philip was white with rage. He would have liked to hit her in the
face with his clenched fist, and in fancy he saw how she would look with
a black eye. There were two lads of eighteen dining at a table near them,
and now and then they looked at Mildred; he wondered if they envied him
dining with a pretty girl; perhaps they were wishing they stood in his
shoes. It was Mildred who broke the silence.

"What's the good of our going away together? I'd be thinking of him all
the time. It wouldn't be much fun for you."

"That's my business," he answered.

She thought over all his reply implicated, and she reddened.

"But that's just beastly."

"What of it?"

"I thought you were a gentleman in every sense of the word."

"You were mistaken."

His reply entertained him, and he laughed as he said it.

"For God's sake don't laugh," she cried. "I can't come away with you,
Philip. I'm awfully sorry. I know I haven't behaved well to you, but one
can't force themselves."

"Have you forgotten that when you were in trouble I did everything for
you? I planked out the money to keep you till your baby was born, I paid
for your doctor and everything, I paid for you to go to Brighton, and I'm
paying for the keep of your baby, I'm paying for your clothes, I'm paying
for every stitch you've got on now."

"If you was a gentleman you wouldn't throw what you've done for me in my
face."

"Oh, for goodness' sake, shut up. What d'you suppose I care if I'm a
gentleman or not? If I were a gentleman I shouldn't waste my time with a
vulgar slut like you. I don't care a damn if you like me or not. I'm sick
of being made a blasted fool of. You're jolly well coming to Paris with me
on Saturday or you can take the consequences."

Her cheeks were red with anger, and when she answered her voice had the
hard commonness which she concealed generally by a genteel enunciation.

"I never liked you, not from the beginning, but you forced yourself on me,
I always hated it when you kissed me. I wouldn't let you touch me now not
if I was starving."

Philip tried to swallow the food on his plate, but the muscles of his
throat refused to act. He gulped down something to drink and lit a
cigarette. He was trembling in every part. He did not speak. He waited for
her to move, but she sat in silence, staring at the white tablecloth. If
they had been alone he would have flung his arms round her and kissed her
passionately; he fancied the throwing back of her long white throat as he
pressed upon her mouth with his lips. They passed an hour without
speaking, and at last Philip thought the waiter began to stare at them
curiously. He called for the bill.

"Shall we go?" he said then, in an even tone.

She did not reply, but gathered together her bag and her gloves. She put
on her coat.

"When are you seeing Griffiths again?"

"Tomorrow," she answered indifferently.

"You'd better talk it over with him."

She opened her bag mechanically and saw a piece of paper in it. She took
it out.

"Here's the bill for this dress," she said hesitatingly.

"What of it?"

"I promised I'd give her the money tomorrow."

"Did you?"

"Does that mean you won't pay for it after having told me I could get it?"

"It does."

"I'll ask Harry," she said, flushing quickly.

"He'll be glad to help you. He owes me seven pounds at the moment, and he
pawned his microscope last week, because he was so broke."

"You needn't think you can frighten me by that. I'm quite capable of
earning my own living."

"It's the best thing you can do. I don't propose to give you a farthing
more."

She thought of her rent due on Saturday and the baby's keep, but did not
say anything. They left the restaurant, and in the street Philip asked
her:

"Shall I call a cab for you? I'm going to take a little stroll."

"I haven't got any money. I had to pay a bill this afternoon."

"It won't hurt you to walk. If you want to see me tomorrow I shall be in
about tea-time."

He took off his hat and sauntered away. He looked round in a moment and
saw that she was standing helplessly where he had left her, looking at the
traffic. He went back and with a laugh pressed a coin into her hand.

"Here's two bob for you to get home with."

Before she could speak he hurried away.

LXXVI

Next day, in the afternoon, Philip sat in his room and wondered whether
Mildred would come. He had slept badly. He had spent the morning in the
club of the Medical School, reading one newspaper after another. It was
the vacation and few students he knew were in London, but he found one or
two people to talk to, he played a game of chess, and so wore out the
tedious hours. After luncheon he felt so tired, his head was aching so,
that he went back to his lodgings and lay down; he tried to read a novel.
He had not seen Griffiths. He was not in when Philip returned the night
before; he heard him come back, but he did not as usual look into Philip's
room to see if he was asleep; and in the morning Philip heard him go out
early. It was clear that he wanted to avoid him. Suddenly there was a
light tap at his door. Philip sprang to his feet and opened it. Mildred
stood on the threshold. She did not move.

"Come in," said Philip.

He closed the door after her. She sat down. She hesitated to begin.

"Thank you for giving me that two shillings last night," she said.

"Oh, that's all right."

She gave him a faint smile. It reminded Philip of the timid, ingratiating
look of a puppy that has been beaten for naughtiness and wants to
reconcile himself with his master.

"I've been lunching with Harry," she said.

"Have you?"

"If you still want me to go away with you on Saturday, Philip, I'll come."

A quick thrill of triumph shot through his heart, but it was a sensation
that only lasted an instant; it was followed by a suspicion.

"Because of the money?" he asked.

"Partly," she answered simply. "Harry can't do anything. He owes five
weeks here, and he owes you seven pounds, and his tailor's pressing him
for money. He'd pawn anything he could, but he's pawned everything
already. I had a job to put the woman off about my new dress, and on
Saturday there's the book at my lodgings, and I can't get work in five
minutes. It always means waiting some little time till there's a vacancy."

She said all this in an even, querulous tone, as though she were
recounting the injustices of fate, which had to be borne as part of the
natural order of things. Philip did not answer. He knew what she told him
well enough.

"You said partly," he observed at last.

"Well, Harry says you've been a brick to both of us. You've been a real
good friend to him, he says, and you've done for me what p'raps no other
man would have done. We must do the straight thing, he says. And he said
what you said about him, that he's fickle by nature, he's not like you,
and I should be a fool to throw you away for him. He won't last and you
will, he says so himself."

"D'you WANT to come away with me?" asked Philip.

"I don't mind."

He looked at her, and the corners of his mouth turned down in an
expression of misery. He had triumphed indeed, and he was going to have
his way. He gave a little laugh of derision at his own humiliation. She
looked at him quickly, but did not speak.

"I've looked forward with all my soul to going away with you, and I
thought at last, after all that wretchedness, I was going to be happy..."

He did not finish what he was going to say. And then on a sudden, without
warning, Mildred broke into a storm of tears. She was sitting in the chair
in which Norah had sat and wept, and like her she hid her face on the back
of it, towards the side where there was a little bump formed by the
sagging in the middle, where the head had rested.

"I'm not lucky with women," thought Philip.

Her thin body was shaken with sobs. Philip had never seen a woman cry with
such an utter abandonment. It was horribly painful, and his heart was
torn. Without realising what he did, he went up to her and put his arms
round her; she did not resist, but in her wretchedness surrendered herself
to his comforting. He whispered to her little words of solace. He scarcely
knew what he was saying, he bent over her and kissed her repeatedly.

"Are you awfully unhappy?" he said at last.

"I wish I was dead," she moaned. "I wish I'd died when the baby come."

Her hat was in her way, and Philip took it off for her. He placed her head
more comfortably in the chair, and then he went and sat down at the table
and looked at her.

"It is awful, love, isn't it?" he said. "Fancy anyone wanting to be in
love."

Presently the violence of her sobbing diminished and she sat in the chair,
exhausted, with her head thrown back and her arms hanging by her side. She
had the grotesque look of one of those painters' dummies used to hang
draperies on.

"I didn't know you loved him so much as all that," said Philip.

He understood Griffiths' love well enough, for he put himself in
Griffiths' place and saw with his eyes, touched with his hands; he was
able to think himself in Griffiths' body, and he kissed her with his lips,
smiled at her with his smiling blue eyes. It was her emotion that
surprised him. He had never thought her capable of passion, and this was
passion: there was no mistaking it. Something seemed to give way in his
heart; it really felt to him as though something were breaking, and he
felt strangely weak.

"I don't want to make you unhappy. You needn't come away with me if you
don't want to. I'll give you the money all the same."

She shook her head.

"No, I said I'd come, and I'll come."

"What's the good, if you're sick with love for him?"

"Yes, that's the word. I'm sick with love. I know it won't last, just as
well as he does, but just now..."

She paused and shut her eyes as though she were going to faint. A strange
idea came to Philip, and he spoke it as it came, without stopping to think
it out.

"Why don't you go away with him?"

"How can I? You know we haven't got the money."

"I'll give you the money"

"You?"

She sat up and looked at him. Her eyes began to shine, and the colour came
into her cheeks.

"Perhaps the best thing would be to get it over, and then you'd come back
to me."

Now that he had made the suggestion he was sick with anguish, and yet the
torture of it gave him a strange, subtle sensation. She stared at him with
open eyes.

"Oh, how could we, on your money? Harry wouldn't think of it."

"Oh yes, he would, if you persuaded him."

Her objections made him insist, and yet he wanted her with all his heart
to refuse vehemently.

"I'll give you a fiver, and you can go away from Saturday to Monday. You
could easily do that. On Monday he's going home till he takes up his
appointment at the North London."

"Oh, Philip, do you mean that?" she cried, clasping her hands. "if you
could only let us go--I would love you so much afterwards, I'd do anything
for you. I'm sure I shall get over it if you'll only do that. Would you
really give us the money?"

"Yes," he said.

She was entirely changed now. She began to laugh. He could see that she
was insanely happy. She got up and knelt down by Philip's side, taking his
hands.

"You are a brick, Philip. You're the best fellow I've ever known. Won't
you be angry with me afterwards?"

He shook his head, smiling, but with what agony in his heart!

"May I go and tell Harry now? And can I say to him that you don't mind? He
won't consent unless you promise it doesn't matter. Oh, you don't know how
I love him! And afterwards I'll do anything you like. I'll come over to
Paris with you or anywhere on Monday."

She got up and put on her hat.

"Where are you going?"

"I'm going to ask him if he'll take me."

"Already?"

"D'you want me to stay? I'll stay if you like."

She sat down, but he gave a little laugh.

"No, it doesn't matter, you'd better go at once. There's only one thing:
I can't bear to see Griffiths just now, it would hurt me too awfully. Say
I have no ill-feeling towards him or anything like that, but ask him to
keep out of my way."

"All right." She sprang up and put on her gloves. "I'll let you know what
he says."

"You'd better dine with me tonight."

"Very well."

She put up her face for him to kiss her, and when he pressed his lips to
hers she threw her arms round his neck.

"You are a darling, Philip."

She sent him a note a couple of hours later to say that she had a headache
and could not dine with him. Philip had almost expected it. He knew that
she was dining with Griffiths. He was horribly jealous, but the sudden
passion which had seized the pair of them seemed like something that had
come from the outside, as though a god had visited them with it, and he
felt himself helpless. It seemed so natural that they should love one
another. He saw all the advantages that Griffiths had over himself and
confessed that in Mildred's place he would have done as Mildred did. What
hurt him most was Griffiths' treachery; they had been such good friends,
and Griffiths knew how passionately devoted he was to Mildred: he might
have spared him.

He did not see Mildred again till Friday; he was sick for a sight of her
by then; but when she came and he realised that he had gone out of her
thoughts entirely, for they were engrossed in Griffiths, he suddenly hated
her. He saw now why she and Griffiths loved one another, Griffiths was
stupid, oh so stupid! he had known that all along, but had shut his eyes
to it, stupid and empty-headed: that charm of his concealed an utter
selfishness; he was willing to sacrifice anyone to his appetites. And how
inane was the life he led, lounging about bars and drinking in music
halls, wandering from one light amour to another! He never read a book, he
was blind to everything that was not frivolous and vulgar; he had never a
thought that was fine: the word most common on his lips was smart; that
was his highest praise for man or woman. Smart! It was no wonder he
pleased Mildred. They suited one another.

Philip talked to Mildred of things that mattered to neither of them. He
knew she wanted to speak of Griffiths, but he gave her no opportunity. He
did not refer to the fact that two evenings before she had put off dining
with him on a trivial excuse. He was casual with her, trying to make her
think he was suddenly grown indifferent; and he exercised peculiar skill
in saying little things which he knew would wound her; but which were so
indefinite, so delicately cruel, that she could not take exception to
them. At last she got up.

"I think I must be going off now," she said.

"I daresay you've got a lot to do," he answered.

She held out her hand, he took it, said good-bye, and opened the door for
her. He knew what she wanted to speak about, and he knew also that his
cold, ironical air intimidated her. Often his shyness made him seem so
frigid that unintentionally he frightened people, and, having discovered
this, he was able when occasion arose to assume the same manner.

"You haven't forgotten what you promised?" she said at last, as he held
open the door.

"What is that?"

"About the money"

"How much d'you want?"

He spoke with an icy deliberation which made his words peculiarly
offensive. Mildred flushed. He knew she hated him at that moment, and he
wondered at the self-control by which she prevented herself from flying
out at him. He wanted to make her suffer.

"There's the dress and the book tomorrow. That's all. Harry won't come, so
we shan't want money for that."

Philip's heart gave a great thud against his ribs, and he let the door
handle go. The door swung to.

"Why not?"

"He says we couldn't, not on your money."

A devil seized Philip, a devil of self-torture which was always lurking
within him, and, though with all his soul he wished that Griffiths and
Mildred should not go away together, he could not help himself; he set
himself to persuade Griffiths through her.

"I don't see why not, if I'm willing," he said.

"That's what I told him."

"I should have thought if he really wanted to go he wouldn't hesitate."

"Oh, it's not that, he wants to all right. He'd go at once if he had the
money."

"If he's squeamish about it I'll give YOU the money."

"I said you'd lend it if he liked, and we'd pay it back as soon as we
could."

"It's rather a change for you going on your knees to get a man to take you
away for a week-end."

"It is rather, isn't it?" she said, with a shameless little laugh. It sent
a cold shudder down Philip's spine.

"What are you going to do then?" he asked.

"Nothing. He's going home tomorrow. He must."

That would be Philip's salvation. With Griffiths out of the way he could
get Mildred back. She knew no one in London, she would be thrown on to his
society, and when they were alone together he could soon make her forget
this infatuation. If he said nothing more he was safe. But he had a
fiendish desire to break down their scruples, he wanted to know how
abominably they could behave towards him; if he tempted them a little more
they would yield, and he took a fierce joy at the thought of their
dishonour. Though every word he spoke tortured him, he found in the
torture a horrible delight.

"It looks as if it were now or never."

"That's what I told him," she said.

There was a passionate note in her voice which struck Philip. He was
biting his nails in his nervousness.

"Where were you thinking of going?"

"Oh, to Oxford. He was at the 'Varsity there, you know. He said he'd show
me the colleges."

Philip remembered that once he had suggested going to Oxford for the day,
and she had expressed firmly the boredom she felt at the thought of
sights.

"And it looks as if you'd have fine weather. It ought to be very jolly
there just now."

"I've done all I could to persuade him."

"Why don't you have another try?"

"Shall I say you want us to go?"

"I don't think you must go as far as that," said Philip.

She paused for a minute or two, looking at him. Philip forced himself to
look at her in a friendly way. He hated her, he despised her, he loved her
with all his heart.

"I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll go and see if he can't arrange it. And
then, if he says yes, I'll come and fetch the money tomorrow. When shall
you be in?"

"I'll come back here after luncheon and wait."

"All right."

"I'll give you the money for your dress and your room now."

He went to his desk and took out what money he had. The dress was six
guineas; there was besides her rent and her food, and the baby's keep for
a week. He gave her eight pounds ten.

"Thanks very much," she said.

She left him.

LXXVII

After lunching in the basement of the Medical School Philip went back to
his rooms. It was Saturday afternoon, and the landlady was cleaning the
stairs.

"Is Mr. Griffiths in?" he asked.

"No, sir. He went away this morning, soon after you went out."

"Isn't he coming back?"

"I don't think so, sir. He's taken his luggage."

Philip wondered what this could mean. He took a book and began to read. It
was Burton's Journey to Meccah, which he had just got out of the
Westminster Public Library; and he read the first page, but could make no
sense of it, for his mind was elsewhere; he was listening all the time for
a ring at the bell. He dared not hope that Griffiths had gone away
already, without Mildred, to his home in Cumberland. Mildred would be
coming presently for the money. He set his teeth and read on; he tried
desperately to concentrate his attention; the sentences etched themselves
in his brain by the force of his effort, but they were distorted by the
agony he was enduring. He wished with all his heart that he had not made
the horrible proposition to give them money; but now that he had made it
he lacked the strength to go back on it, not on Mildred's account, but on
his own. There was a morbid obstinacy in him which forced him to do the
thing he had determined. He discovered that the three pages he had read
had made no impression on him at all; and he went back and started from
the beginning: he found himself reading one sentence over and over again;
and now it weaved itself in with his thoughts, horribly, like some formula
in a nightmare. One thing he could do was to go out and keep away till
midnight; they could not go then; and he saw them calling at the house
every hour to ask if he was in. He enjoyed the thought of their
disappointment. He repeated that sentence to himself mechanically. But he
could not do that. Let them come and take the money, and he would know
then to what depths of infamy it was possible for men to descend. He could
not read any more now. He simply could not see the words. He leaned back
in his chair, closing his eyes, and, numb with misery, waited for Mildred.

The landlady came in.

"Will you see Mrs. Miller, sir?"

"Show her in."

Philip pulled himself together to receive her without any sign of what he
was feeling. He had an impulse to throw himself on his knees and seize her
hands and beg her not to go; but he knew there was no way of moving her;
she would tell Griffiths what he had said and how he acted. He was
ashamed.

"Well, how about the little jaunt?" he said gaily.

"We're going. Harry's outside. I told him you didn't want to see him, so
he's kept out of your way. But he wants to know if he can come in just for
a minute to say good-bye to you."

"No, I won't see him," said Philip.

He could see she did not care if he saw Griffiths or not. Now that she was
there he wanted her to go quickly.

"Look here, here's the fiver. I'd like you to go now."

She took it and thanked him. She turned to leave the room.

"When are you coming back?" he asked.

"Oh, on Monday. Harry must go home then."

He knew what he was going to say was humiliating, but he was broken down
with jealousy and desire.

"Then I shall see you, shan't I?"

He could not help the note of appeal in his voice.

"Of course. I'll let you know the moment I'm back."

He shook hands with her. Through the curtains he watched her jump into a
four-wheeler that stood at the door. It rolled away. Then he threw himself
on his bed and hid his face in his hands. He felt tears coming to his
eyes, and he was angry with himself; he clenched his hands and screwed up
his body to prevent them; but he could not; and great painful sobs were
forced from him.

He got up at last, exhausted and ashamed, and washed his face. He mixed
himself a strong whiskey and soda. It made him feel a little better. Then
he caught sight of the tickets to Paris, which were on the chimney-piece,
and, seizing them, with an impulse of rage he flung them in the fire. He
knew he could have got the money back on them, but it relieved him to
destroy them. Then he went out in search of someone to be with. The club
was empty. He felt he would go mad unless he found someone to talk to; but
Lawson was abroad; he went on to Hayward's rooms: the maid who opened the
door told him that he had gone down to Brighton for the week-end. Then
Philip went to a gallery and found it was just closing. He did not know
what to do. He was distracted. And he thought of Griffiths and Mildred
going to Oxford, sitting opposite one another in the train, happy. He went
back to his rooms, but they filled him with horror, he had been so
wretched in them; he tried once more to read Burton's book, but, as he
read, he told himself again and again what a fool he had been; it was he
who had made the suggestion that they should go away, he had offered the
money, he had forced it upon them; he might have known what would happen
when he introduced Griffiths to Mildred; his own vehement passion was
enough to arouse the other's desire. By this time they had reached Oxford.
They would put up in one of the lodging-houses in John Street; Philip had
never been to Oxford, but Griffiths had talked to him about it so much
that he knew exactly where they would go; and they would dine at the
Clarendon: Griffiths had been in the habit of dining there when he went on
the spree. Philip got himself something to eat in a restaurant near
Charing Cross; he had made up his mind to go to a play, and afterwards he
fought his way into the pit of a theatre at which one of Oscar Wilde's
pieces was being performed. He wondered if Mildred and Griffiths would go
to a play that evening: they must kill the evening somehow; they were too
stupid, both of them to content themselves with conversation: he got a
fierce delight in reminding himself of the vulgarity of their minds which
suited them so exactly to one another. He watched the play with an
abstracted mind, trying to give himself gaiety by drinking whiskey in each
interval; he was unused to alcohol, and it affected him quickly, but his
drunkenness was savage and morose. When the play was over he had another
drink. He could not go to bed, he knew he would not sleep, and he dreaded
the pictures which his vivid imagination would place before him. He tried
not to think of them. He knew he had drunk too much. Now he was seized
with a desire to do horrible, sordid things; he wanted to roll himself in
gutters; his whole being yearned for beastliness; he wanted to grovel.

He walked up Piccadilly, dragging his club-foot, sombrely drunk, with rage
and misery clawing at his heart. He was stopped by a painted harlot, who
put her hand on his arm; he pushed her violently away with brutal words.
He walked on a few steps and then stopped. She would do as well as
another. He was sorry he had spoken so roughly to her. He went up to her.

"I say," he began.

"Go to hell," she said.

Philip laughed.

"I merely wanted to ask if you'd do me the honour of supping with me
tonight."

She looked at him with amazement, and hesitated for a while. She saw he
was drunk.

"I don't mind."

He was amused that she should use a phrase he had heard so often on
Mildred's lips. He took her to one of the restaurants he had been in the
habit of going to with Mildred. He noticed as they walked along that she
looked down at his limb.

"I've got a club-foot," he said. "Have you any objection?"

"You are a cure," she laughed.

When he got home his bones were aching, and in his head there was a
hammering that made him nearly scream. He took another whiskey and soda to
steady himself, and going to bed sank into a dreamless sleep till mid-day.

LXXVIII

At last Monday came, and Philip thought his long torture was over. Looking
out the trains he found that the latest by which Griffiths could reach
home that night left Oxford soon after one, and he supposed that Mildred
would take one which started a few minutes later to bring her to London.
His desire was to go and meet it, but he thought Mildred would like to be
left alone for a day; perhaps she would drop him a line in the evening to
say she was back, and if not he would call at her lodgings next morning:
his spirit was cowed. He felt a bitter hatred for Griffiths, but for
Mildred, notwithstanding all that had passed, only a heart-rending desire.
He was glad now that Hayward was not in London on Saturday afternoon when,
distraught, he went in search of human comfort: he could not have
prevented himself from telling him everything, and Hayward would have been
astonished at his weakness. He would despise him, and perhaps be shocked
or disgusted that he could envisage the possibility of making Mildred his
mistress after she had given herself to another man. What did he care if
it was shocking or disgusting? He was ready for any compromise, prepared
for more degrading humiliations still, if he could only gratify his
desire.

Towards the evening his steps took him against his will to the house in
which she lived, and he looked up at her window. It was dark. He did not
venture to ask if she was back. He was confident in her promise. But there
was no letter from her in the morning, and, when about mid-day he called,
the maid told him she had not arrived. He could not understand it. He knew
that Griffiths would have been obliged to go home the day before, for he
was to be best man at a wedding, and Mildred had no money. He turned over
in his mind every possible thing that might have happened. He went again
in the afternoon and left a note, asking her to dine with him that evening
as calmly as though the events of the last fortnight had not happened. He
mentioned the place and time at which they were to meet, and hoping
against hope kept the appointment: though he waited for an hour she did
not come. On Wednesday morning he was ashamed to ask at the house and sent
a messenger-boy with a letter and instructions to bring back a reply; but
in an hour the boy came back with Philip's letter unopened and the answer
that the lady had not returned from the country. Philip was beside
himself. The last deception was more than he could bear. He repeated to
himself over and over again that he loathed Mildred, and, ascribing to
Griffiths this new disappointment, he hated him so much that he knew what
was the delight of murder: he walked about considering what a joy it would
be to come upon him on a dark night and stick a knife into his throat,
just about the carotid artery, and leave him to die in the street like a
dog. Philip was out of his senses with grief and rage. He did not like
whiskey, but he drank to stupefy himself. He went to bed drunk on the
Tuesday and on the Wednesday night.

On Thursday morning he got up very late and dragged himself, blear-eyed
and sallow, into his sitting-room to see if there were any letters. A
curious feeling shot through his heart when he recognised the handwriting
of Griffiths.

Dear old man:

I hardly know how to write to you and yet I feel I must write. I hope
you're not awfully angry with me. I know I oughtn't to have gone away with
Milly, but I simply couldn't help myself. She simply carried me off my
feet and I would have done anything to get her. When she told me you had
offered us the money to go I simply couldn't resist. And now it's all over
I'm awfully ashamed of myself and I wish I hadn't been such a fool. I wish
you'd write and say you're not angry with me, and I want you to let me
come and see you. I was awfully hurt at your telling Milly you didn't want
to see me. Do write me a line, there's a good chap, and tell me you
forgive me. It'll ease my conscience. I thought you wouldn't mind or you
wouldn't have offered the money. But I know I oughtn't to have taken it.
I came home on Monday and Milly wanted to stay a couple of days at Oxford
by herself. She's going back to London on Wednesday, so by the time you
receive this letter you will have seen her and I hope everything will go
off all right. Do write and say you forgive me. Please write at once.
                                                       Yours ever,
                                                                 Harry.

Philip tore up the letter furiously. He did not mean to answer it. He
despised Griffiths for his apologies, he had no patience with his
prickings of conscience: one could do a dastardly thing if one chose, but
it was contemptible to regret it afterwards. He thought the letter
cowardly and hypocritical. He was disgusted at its sentimentality.

"It would be very easy if you could do a beastly thing," he muttered to
himself, "and then say you were sorry, and that put it all right again."

He hoped with all his heart he would have the chance one day to do
Griffiths a bad turn.

But at all events he knew that Mildred was in town. He dressed hurriedly,
not waiting to shave, drank a cup of tea, and took a cab to her rooms. The
cab seemed to crawl. He was painfully anxious to see her, and
unconsciously he uttered a prayer to the God he did not believe in to make
her receive him kindly. He only wanted to forget. With beating heart he
rang the bell. He forgot all his suffering in the passionate desire to
enfold her once more in his arms.

"Is Mrs. Miller in?" he asked joyously.

"She's gone," the maid answered.

He looked at her blankly.

"She came about an hour ago and took away her things."

For a moment he did not know what to say.

"Did you give her my letter? Did she say where she was going?"

Then he understood that Mildred had deceived him again. She was not coming
back to him. He made an effort to save his face.

"Oh, well, I daresay I shall hear from her. She may have sent a letter to
another address."

He turned away and went back hopeless to his rooms. He might have known
that she would do this; she had never cared for him, she had made a fool
of him from the beginning; she had no pity, she had no kindness, she had
no charity. The only thing was to accept the inevitable. The pain he was
suffering was horrible, he would sooner be dead than endure it; and the
thought came to him that it would be better to finish with the whole
thing: he might throw himself in the river or put his neck on a railway
line; but he had no sooner set the thought into words than he rebelled
against it. His reason told him that he would get over his unhappiness in
time; if he tried with all his might he could forget her; and it would be
grotesque to kill himself on account of a vulgar slut. He had only one
life, and it was madness to fling it away. He FELT that he would never
overcome his passion, but he KNEW that after all it was only a matter
of time.

He would not stay in London. There everything reminded him of his
unhappiness. He telegraphed to his uncle that he was coming to
Blackstable, and, hurrying to pack, took the first train he could. He
wanted to get away from the sordid rooms in which he had endured so much
suffering. He wanted to breathe clean air. He was disgusted with himself.
He felt that he was a little mad.

Since he was grown up Philip had been given the best spare room at the
vicarage. It was a corner-room and in front of one window was an old tree
which blocked the view, but from the other you saw, beyond the garden and
the vicarage field, broad meadows. Philip remembered the wall-paper from
his earliest years. On the walls were quaint water colours of the early
Victorian period by a friend of the Vicar's youth. They had a faded charm.
The dressing-table was surrounded by stiff muslin. There was an old
tall-boy to put your clothes in. Philip gave a sigh of pleasure; he had
never realised that all those things meant anything to him at all. At the
vicarage life went on as it had always done. No piece of furniture had
been moved from one place to another; the Vicar ate the same things, said
the same things, went for the same walk every day; he had grown a little
fatter, a little more silent, a little more narrow. He had become
accustomed to living without his wife and missed her very little. He
bickered still with Josiah Graves. Philip went to see the churchwarden. He
was a little thinner, a little whiter, a little more austere; he was
autocratic still and still disapproved of candles on the altar. The shops
had still a pleasant quaintness; and Philip stood in front of that in
which things useful to seamen were sold, sea-boots and tarpaulins and
tackle, and remembered that he had felt there in his childhood the thrill
of the sea and the adventurous magic of the unknown.

He could not help his heart beating at each double knock of the postman in
case there might be a letter from Mildred sent on by his landlady in
London; but he knew that there would be none. Now that he could think it
out more calmly he understood that in trying to force Mildred to love him
he had been attempting the impossible. He did not know what it was that
passed from a man to a woman, from a woman to a man, and made one of them
a slave: it was convenient to call it the sexual instinct; but if it was
no more than that, he did not understand why it should occasion so
vehement an attraction to one person rather than another. It was
irresistible: the mind could not battle with it; friendship, gratitude,
interest, had no power beside it. Because he had not attracted Mildred
sexually, nothing that he did had any effect upon her. The idea revolted
him; it made human nature beastly; and he felt suddenly that the hearts of
men were full of dark places. Because Mildred was indifferent to him he
had thought her sexless; her anaemic appearance and thin lips, the body
with its narrow hips and flat chest, the languor of her manner, carried
out his supposition; and yet she was capable of sudden passions which made
her willing to risk everything to gratify them. He had never understood
her adventure with Emil Miller: it had seemed so unlike her, and she had
never been able to explain it; but now that he had seen her with Griffiths
he knew that just the same thing had happened then: she had been carried
off her feet by an ungovernable desire. He tried to think out what those
two men had which so strangely attracted her. They both had a vulgar
facetiousness which tickled her simple sense of humour, and a certain
coarseness of nature; but what took her perhaps was the blatant sexuality
which was their most marked characteristic. She had a genteel refinement
which shuddered at the facts of life, she looked upon the bodily functions
as indecent, she had all sorts of euphemisms for common objects, she
always chose an elaborate word as more becoming than a simple one: the
brutality of these men was like a whip on her thin white shoulders, and
she shuddered with voluptuous pain.

One thing Philip had made up his mind about. He would not go back to the
lodgings in which he had suffered. He wrote to his landlady and gave her
notice. He wanted to have his own things about him. He determined to take
unfurnished rooms: it would be pleasant and cheaper; and this was an
urgent consideration, for during the last year and a half he had spent
nearly seven hundred pounds. He must make up for it now by the most rigid
economy. Now and then he thought of the future with panic; he had been a
fool to spend so much money on Mildred; but he knew that if it were to
come again he would act in the same way. It amused him sometimes to
consider that his friends, because he had a face which did not express his
feelings very vividly and a rather slow way of moving, looked upon him as
strong-minded, deliberate, and cool. They thought him reasonable and
praised his common sense; but he knew that his placid expression was no
more than a mask, assumed unconsciously, which acted like the protective
colouring of butterflies; and himself was astonished at the weakness of
his will. It seemed to him that he was swayed by every light emotion, as
though he were a leaf in the wind, and when passion seized him he was
powerless. He had no self-control. He merely seemed to possess it because
he was indifferent to many of the things which moved other people.

He considered with some irony the philosophy which he had developed for
himself, for it had not been of much use to him in the conjuncture he had
passed through; and he wondered whether thought really helped a man in any
of the critical affairs of life: it seemed to him rather that he was
swayed by some power alien to and yet within himself, which urged him like
that great wind of Hell which drove Paolo and Francesca ceaselessly on. He
thought of what he was going to do and, when the time came to act, he was
powerless in the grasp of instincts, emotions, he knew not what. He acted
as though he were a machine driven by the two forces of his environment
and his personality; his reason was someone looking on, observing the
facts but powerless to interfere: it was like those gods of Epicurus, who
saw the doings of men from their empyrean heights and had no might to
alter one smallest particle of what occurred.

LXXIX

Philip went up to London a couple of days before the session began in
order to find himself rooms. He hunted about the streets that led out of
the Westminster Bridge Road, but their dinginess was distasteful to him;
and at last he found one in Kennington which had a quiet and old-world
air. It reminded one a little of the London which Thackeray knew on that
side of the river, and in the Kennington Road, through which the great
barouche of the Newcomes must have passed as it drove the family to the
West of London, the plane-trees were bursting into leaf. The houses in the
street which Philip fixed upon were two-storied, and in most of the
windows was a notice to state that lodgings were to let. He knocked at one
which announced that the lodgings were unfurnished, and was shown by an
austere, silent woman four very small rooms, in one of which there was a
kitchen range and a sink. The rent was nine shillings a week. Philip did
not want so many rooms, but the rent was low and he wished to settle down
at once. He asked the landlady if she could keep the place clean for him
and cook his breakfast, but she replied that she had enough work to do
without that; and he was pleased rather than otherwise because she
intimated that she wished to have nothing more to do with him than to
receive his rent. She told him that, if he inquired at the grocer's round
the corner, which was also a post office, he might hear of a woman who
would `do' for him.

Philip had a little furniture which he had gathered as he went along, an
arm-chair that he had bought in Paris, and a table, a few drawings, and
the small Persian rug which Cronshaw had given him. His uncle had offered
a fold-up bed for which, now that he no longer let his house in August, he
had no further use; and by spending another ten pounds Philip bought
himself whatever else was essential. He spent ten shillings on putting a
corn-coloured paper in the room he was making his parlour; and he hung on
the walls a sketch which Lawson had given him of the Quai des Grands
Augustins, and the photograph of the Odalisque by Ingres and Manet's
Olympia which in Paris had been the objects of his contemplation while
he shaved. To remind himself that he too had once been engaged in the
practice of art, he put up a charcoal drawing of the young Spaniard Miguel
Ajuria: it was the best thing he had ever done, a nude standing with
clenched hands, his feet gripping the floor with a peculiar force, and on
his face that air of determination which had been so impressive; and
though Philip after the long interval saw very well the defects of his
work its associations made him look upon it with tolerance. He wondered
what had happened to Miguel. There is nothing so terrible as the pursuit
of art by those who have no talent. Perhaps, worn out by exposure,
starvation, disease, he had found an end in some hospital, or in an access
of despair had sought death in the turbid Seine; but perhaps with his
Southern instability he had given up the struggle of his own accord, and
now, a clerk in some office in Madrid, turned his fervent rhetoric to
politics and bull-fighting.

Philip asked Lawson and Hayward to come and see his new rooms, and they
came, one with a bottle of whiskey, the other with a pate de foie gras;
and he was delighted when they praised his taste. He would have invited
the Scotch stockbroker too, but he had only three chairs, and thus could
entertain only a definite number of guests. Lawson was aware that through
him Philip had become very friendly with Norah Nesbit and now remarked
that he had run across her a few days before.

"She was asking how you were."

Philip flushed at the mention of her name (he could not get himself out of
the awkward habit of reddening when he was embarrassed), and Lawson looked
at him quizzically. Lawson, who now spent most of the year in London, had
so far surrendered to his environment as to wear his hair short and to
dress himself in a neat serge suit and a bowler hat.

"I gather that all is over between you," he said.

"I've not seen her for months."

"She was looking rather nice. She had a very smart hat on with a lot of
white ostrich feathers on it. She must be doing pretty well."

Philip changed the conversation, but he kept thinking of her, and after an
interval, when the three of them were talking of something else, he asked
suddenly:

"Did you gather that Norah was angry with me?"

"Not a bit. She talked very nicely of you."

"I've got half a mind to go and see her."

"She won't eat you."

Philip had thought of Norah often. When Mildred left him his first thought
was of her, and he told himself bitterly that she would never have treated
him so. His impulse was to go to her; he could depend on her pity; but he
was ashamed: she had been good to him always, and he had treated her
abominably.

"If I'd only had the sense to stick to her!" he said to himself,
afterwards, when Lawson and Hayward had gone and he was smoking a last
pipe before going to bed.

He remembered the pleasant hours they had spent together in the cosy
sitting-room in Vincent Square, their visits to galleries and to the play,
and the charming evenings of intimate conversation. He recollected her
solicitude for his welfare and her interest in all that concerned him. She
had loved him with a love that was kind and lasting, there was more than
sensuality in it, it was almost maternal; he had always known that it was
a precious thing for which with all his soul he should thank the gods. He
made up his mind to throw himself on her mercy. She must have suffered
horribly, but he felt she had the greatness of heart to forgive him: she
was incapable of malice. Should he write to her? No. He would break in on
her suddenly and cast himself at her feet--he knew that when the time came
he would feel too shy to perform such a dramatic gesture, but that was how
he liked to think of it--and tell her that if she would take him back she
might rely on him for ever. He was cured of the hateful disease from which
he had suffered, he knew her worth, and now she might trust him. His
imagination leaped forward to the future. He pictured himself rowing with
her on the river on Sundays; he would take her to Greenwich, he had never
forgotten that delightful excursion with Hayward, and the beauty of the
Port of London remained a permanent treasure in his recollection; and on
the warm summer afternoons they would sit in the Park together and talk:
he laughed to himself as he remembered her gay chatter, which poured out
like a brook bubbling over little stones, amusing, flippant, and full of
character. The agony he had suffered would pass from his mind like a bad
dream.

But when next day, about tea-time, an hour at which he was pretty certain
to find Norah at home, he knocked at her door his courage suddenly failed
him. Was it possible for her to forgive him? It would be abominable of him
to force himself on her presence. The door was opened by a maid new since
he had been in the habit of calling every day, and he inquired if Mrs.
Nesbit was in.

"Will you ask her if she could see Mr. Carey?" he said. "I'll wait here."

The maid ran upstairs and in a moment clattered down again.

"Will you step up, please, sir. Second floor front."

"I know," said Philip, with a slight smile.

He went with a fluttering heart. He knocked at the door.

"Come in," said the well-known, cheerful voice.

It seemed to say come in to a new life of peace and happiness. When he
entered Norah stepped forward to greet him. She shook hands with him as if
they had parted the day before. A man stood up.

"Mr. Carey--Mr. Kingsford."

Philip, bitterly disappointed at not finding her alone, sat down and took
stock of the stranger. He had never heard her mention his name, but he
seemed to Philip to occupy his chair as though he were very much at home.
He was a man of forty, clean-shaven, with long fair hair very neatly
plastered down, and the reddish skin and pale, tired eyes which fair men
get when their youth is passed. He had a large nose, a large mouth; the
bones of his face were prominent, and he was heavily made; he was a man of
more than average height, and broad-shouldered.

"I was wondering what had become of you," said Norah, in her sprightly
manner. "I met Mr. Lawson the other day--did he tell you?--and I informed
him that it was really high time you came to see me again."

Philip could see no shadow of embarrassment in her countenance, and he
admired the use with which she carried off an encounter of which himself
felt the intense awkwardness. She gave him tea. She was about to put sugar
in it when he stopped her.

"How stupid of me!" she cried. "I forgot."

He did not believe that. She must remember quite well that he never took
sugar in his tea. He accepted the incident as a sign that her nonchalance
was affected.

The conversation which Philip had interrupted went on, and presently he
began to feel a little in the way. Kingsford took no particular notice of
him. He talked fluently and well, not without humour, but with a slightly
dogmatic manner: he was a journalist, it appeared, and had something
amusing to say on every topic that was touched upon; but it exasperated
Philip to find himself edged out of the conversation. He was determined to
stay the visitor out. He wondered if he admired Norah. In the old days
they had often talked of the men who wanted to flirt with her and had
laughed at them together. Philip tried to bring back the conversation to
matters which only he and Norah knew about, but each time the journalist
broke in and succeeded in drawing it away to a subject upon which Philip
was forced to be silent. He grew faintly angry with Norah, for she must
see he was being made ridiculous; but perhaps she was inflicting this upon
him as a punishment, and with this thought he regained his good humour. At
last, however, the clock struck six, and Kingsford got up.

"I must go," he said.

Norah shook hands with him, and accompanied him to the landing. She shut
the door behind her and stood outside for a couple of minutes. Philip
wondered what they were talking about.

"Who is Mr. Kingsford?" he asked cheerfully, when she returned.

"Oh, he's the editor of one of Harmsworth's Magazines. He's been taking a
good deal of my work lately."

"I thought he was never going."

"I'm glad you stayed. I wanted to have a talk with you." She curled
herself into the large arm-chair, feet and all, in a way her small size
made possible, and lit a cigarette. He smiled when he saw her assume the
attitude which had always amused him.

"You look just like a cat."

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 pleasant, cheerful, amusing,
affectionate; he invented convincing excuses for the interval since last
he had seen her; but he did everything he could to avoid her. When she
forced him to make appointments he sent telegrams to her at the last
moment to put himself off; and his landlady (the first three months of his
appointment he was spending in rooms) had orders to say he was out when
Mildred called. She would waylay him in the street and, knowing she had
been waiting about for him to come out of the hospital for a couple of
hours, he would give her a few charming, friendly words and bolt off with
the excuse that he had a business engagement. He grew very skilful in
slipping out of the hospital unseen. Once, when he went back to his
lodgings at midnight, he saw a woman standing at the area railings and
suspecting who it was went to beg a shake-down in Ramsden's rooms; next
day the landlady told him that Mildred had sat crying on the doorsteps for
hours, and she had been obliged to tell her at last that if she did not go
away she would send for a policeman.

"I tell you, my boy," said Ramsden, "you're jolly well out of it. Harry
says that if he'd suspected for half a second she was going to make such
a blooming nuisance of herself he'd have seen himself damned before he had
anything to do with her."

Philip thought of her sitting on that doorstep through the long hours of
the night. He saw her face as she looked up dully at the landlady who sent
her away.

"I wonder what she's doing now."

"Oh, she's got a job somewhere, thank God. That keeps her busy all day."

The last thing he heard, just before the end of the summer session, was
that Griffiths, urbanity had given way at length under the exasperation of
the constant persecution. He had told Mildred that he was sick of being
pestered, and she had better take herself off and not bother him again.

"It was the only thing he could do," said Ramsden. "It was getting a bit
too thick."

"Is it all over then?" asked Philip.

"Oh, he hasn't seen her for ten days. You know, Harry's wonderful at
dropping people. This is about the toughest nut he's ever had to crack,
but he's cracked it all right."

Then Philip heard nothing more of her at all. She vanished into the vast
anonymous mass of the population of London.

LXXXI

At the beginning of the winter session Philip became an out-patients'
clerk. There were three assistant-physicians who took out-patients, two
days a week each, and Philip put his name down for Dr. Tyrell. He was
popular with the students, and there was some competition to be his clerk.
Dr. Tyrell was a tall, thin man of thirty-five, with a very small head,
red hair cut short, and prominent blue eyes: his face was bright scarlet.
He talked well in a pleasant voice, was fond of a little joke, and treated
the world lightly. He was a successful man, with a large consulting
practice and a knighthood in prospect. From commerce with students and
poor people he had the patronising air, and from dealing always with the
sick he had the healthy man's jovial condescension, which some consultants
achieve as the professional manner. He made the patient feel like a boy
confronted by a jolly schoolmaster; his illness was an absurd piece of
naughtiness which amused rather than irritated.

The student was supposed to attend in the out-patients' room every day,
see cases, and pick up what information he could; but on the days on which
he clerked his duties were a little more definite. At that time the
out-patients' department at St. Luke's consisted of three rooms, leading
into one another, and a large, dark waiting-room with massive pillars of
masonry and long benches. Here the patients waited after having been given
their `letters' at mid-day; and the long rows of them, bottles and
gallipots in hand, some tattered and dirty, others decent enough, sitting
in the dimness, men and women of all ages, children, gave one an
impression which was weird and horrible. They suggested the grim drawings
of Daumier. All the rooms were painted alike, in salmon-colour with a high
dado of maroon; and there was in them an odour of disinfectants, mingling
as the afternoon wore on with the crude stench of humanity. The first room
was the largest and in the middle of it were a table and an office chair
for the physician; on each side of this were two smaller tables, a little
lower: at one of these sat the house-physician and at the other the clerk
who took the `book' for the day. This was a large volume in which were
written down the name, age, sex, profession, of the patient and the
diagnosis of his disease.

At half past one the house-physician came in, rang the bell, and told the
porter to send in the old patients. There were always a good many of
these, and it was necessary to get through as many of them as possible
before Dr. Tyrell came at two. The H.P. with whom Philip came in contact
was a dapper little man, excessively conscious of his importance: he
treated the clerks with condescension and patently resented the
familiarity of older students who had been his contemporaries and did not
use him with the respect he felt his present position demanded. He set
about the cases. A clerk helped him. The patients streamed in. The men
came first. Chronic bronchitis, "a nasty 'acking cough," was what they
chiefly suffered from; one went to the H.P. and the other to the clerk,
handing in their letters: if they were going on well the words Rep 14
were written on them, and they went to the dispensary with their bottles
or gallipots in order to have medicine given them for fourteen days more.
Some old stagers held back so that they might be seen by the physician
himself, but they seldom succeeded in this; and only three or four, whose
condition seemed to demand his attention, were kept.

Dr. Tyrell came in with quick movements and a breezy manner. He reminded
one slightly of a clown leaping into the arena of a circus with the cry:
Here we are again. His air seemed to indicate: What's all this nonsense
about being ill? I'll soon put that right. He took his seat, asked if
there were any old patients for him to see, rapidly passed them in review,
looking at them with shrewd eyes as he discussed their symptoms, cracked
a joke (at which all the clerks laughed heartily) with the H.P., who
laughed heartily too but with an air as if he thought it was rather
impudent for the clerks to laugh, remarked that it was a fine day or a hot
one, and rang the bell for the porter to show in the new patients.

They came in one by one and walked up to the table at which sat Dr.
Tyrell. They were old men and young men and middle-aged men, mostly of the
labouring class, dock labourers, draymen, factory hands, barmen; but some,
neatly dressed, were of a station which was obviously superior,
shop-assistants, clerks, and the like. Dr. Tyrell looked at these with
suspicion. Sometimes they put on shabby clothes in order to pretend they
were poor; but he had a keen eye to prevent what he regarded as fraud and
sometimes refused to see people who, he thought, could well pay for
medical attendance. Women were the worst offenders and they managed the
thing more clumsily. They would wear a cloak and a skirt which were almost
in rags, and neglect to take the rings off their fingers.

"If you can afford to wear jewellery you can afford a doctor. A hospital
is a charitable institution," said Dr. Tyrell.

He handed back the letter and called for the next case.

"But I've got my letter."

"I don't care a hang about your letter; you get out. You've got no
business to come and steal the time which is wanted by the really poor."

The patient retired sulkily, with an angry scowl.

"She'll probably write a letter to the papers on the gross mismanagement
of the London hospitals," said Dr. Tyrell, with a smile, as he took the
next paper and gave the patient one of his shrewd glances.

Most of them were under the impression that the hospital was an
institution of the state, for which they paid out of the rates, and took
the attendance they received as a right they could claim. They imagined
the physician who gave them his time was heavily paid.

Dr. Tyrell gave each of his clerks a case to examine. The clerk took the
patient into one of the inner rooms; they were smaller, and each had a
couch in it covered with black horse-hair: he asked his patient a variety
of questions, examined his lungs, his heart, and his liver, made notes of
fact on the hospital letter, formed in his own mind some idea of the
diagnosis, and then waited for Dr. Tyrell to come in. This he did,
followed by a small crowd of students, when he had finished the men, and
the clerk read out what he had learned. The physician asked him one or two
questions, and examined the patient himself. If there was anything
interesting to hear students applied their stethoscope: you would see a
man with two or three to the chest, and two perhaps to his back, while
others waited impatiently to listen. The patient stood among them a little
embarrassed, but not altogether displeased to find himself the centre of
attention: he listened confusedly while Dr. Tyrell discoursed glibly on
the case. Two or three students listened again to recognise the murmur or
the crepitation which the physician described, and then the man was told
to put on his clothes.

When the various cases had been examined Dr. Tyrell went back into the
large room and sat down again at his desk. He asked any student who
happened to be standing near him what he would prescribe for a patient he
had just seen. The student mentioned one or two drugs.

"Would you?" said Dr. Tyrell. "Well, that's original at all events. I
don't think we'll be rash."

This always made the students laugh, and with a twinkle of amusement at
his own bright humour the physician prescribed some other drug than that
which the student had suggested. When there were two cases of exactly the
same sort and the student proposed the treatment which the physician had
ordered for the first, Dr. Tyrell exercised considerable ingenuity in
thinking of something else. Sometimes, knowing that in the dispensary they
were worked off their legs and preferred to give the medicines which they
had all ready, the good hospital mixtures which had been found by the
experience of years to answer their purpose so well, he amused himself by
writing an elaborate prescription.

"We'll give the dispenser something to do. If we go on prescribing mist:
alb: he'll lose his cunning."

The students laughed, and the doctor gave them a circular glance of
enjoyment in his joke. Then he touched the bell and, when the porter poked
his head in, said:

"Old women, please."

He leaned back in his chair, chatting with the H.P. while the porter
herded along the old patients. They came in, strings of anaemic girls,
with large fringes and pallid lips, who could not digest their bad,
insufficient food; old ladies, fat and thin, aged prematurely by frequent
confinements, with winter coughs; women with this, that, and the other,
the matter with them. Dr. Tyrell and his house-physician got through them
quickly. Time was getting on, and the air in the small room was growing
more sickly. The physician looked at his watch.

"Are there many new women today?" he asked.

"A good few, I think," said the H.P.

"We'd better have them in. You can go on with the old ones."

They entered. With the men the most common ailments were due to the
excessive use of alcohol, but with the women they were due to defective
nourishment. By about six o'clock they were finished. Philip, exhausted by
standing all the time, by the bad air, and by the attention he had given,
strolled over with his fellow-clerks to the Medical School to have tea. He
found the work of absorbing interest. There was humanity there in the
rough, the materials the artist worked on; and Philip felt a curious
thrill when it occurred to him that he was in the position of the artist
and the patients were like clay in his hands. He remembered with an amused
shrug of the shoulders his life in Paris, absorbed in colour, tone,
values, Heaven knows what, with the aim of producing beautiful things: the
directness of contact with men and women gave a thrill of power which he
had never known. He found an endless excitement in looking at their faces
and hearing them speak; they came in each with his peculiarity, some
shuffling uncouthly, some with a little trip, others with heavy, slow
tread, some shyly. Often you could guess their trades by the look of them.
You learnt in what way to put your questions so that they should be
understood, you discovered on what subjects nearly all lied, and by what
inquiries you could extort the truth notwithstanding. You saw the
different way people took the same things. The diagnosis of dangerous
illness would be accepted by one with a laugh and a joke, by another with
dumb despair. Philip found that he was less shy with these people than he
had ever been with others; he felt not exactly sympathy, for sympathy
suggests condescension; but he felt at home with them. He found that he
was able to put them at their ease, and, when he had been given a case to
find out what he could about it, it seemed to him that the patient
delivered himself into his hands with a peculiar confidence.

"Perhaps," he thought to himself, with a smile, "perhaps I'm cut out to be
a doctor. It would be rather a lark if I'd hit upon the one thing I'm fit
for."

It seemed to Philip that he alone of the clerks saw the dramatic interest
of those afternoons. To the others men and women were only cases, good if
they were complicated, tiresome if obvious; they heard murmurs and were
astonished at abnormal livers; an unexpected sound in the lungs gave them
something to talk about. But to Philip there was much more. He found an
interest in just looking at them, in the shape of their heads and their
hands, in the look of their eyes and the length of their noses. You saw in
that room human nature taken by surprise, and often the mask of custom was
torn off rudely, showing you the soul all raw. Sometimes you saw an
untaught stoicism which was profoundly moving. Once Philip saw a man,
rough and illiterate, told his case was hopeless; and, self-controlled
himself, he wondered at the splendid instinct which forced the fellow to
keep a stiff upper-lip before strangers. But was it possible for him to be
brave when he was by himself, face to face with his soul, or would he then
surrender to despair? Sometimes there was tragedy. Once a young woman
brought her sister to be examined, a girl of eighteen, with delicate
features and large blue eyes, fair hair that sparkled with gold when a ray
of autumn sunshine touched it for a moment, and a skin of amazing beauty.
The students' eyes went to her with little smiles. They did not often see
a pretty girl in these dingy rooms. The elder woman gave the family
history, father and mother had died of phthisis, a brother and a sister,
these two were the only ones left. The girl had been coughing lately and
losing weight. She took off her blouse and the skin of her neck was like
milk. Dr. Tyrell examined her quietly, with his usual rapid method; he
told two or three of his clerks to apply their stethoscopes to a place he
indicated with his finger; and then she was allowed to dress. The sister
was standing a little apart and she spoke to him in a low voice, so that
the girl should not hear. Her voice trembled with fear.

"She hasn't got it, doctor, has she?"

"I'm afraid there's no doubt about it."

"She was the last one. When she goes I shan't have anybody."

She began to cry, while the doctor looked at her gravely; he thought she
too had the type; she would not make old bones either. The girl turned
round and saw her sister's tears. She understood what they meant. The
colour fled from her lovely face and tears fell down her cheeks. The two
stood for a minute or two, crying silently, and then the older, forgetting
the indifferent crowd that watched them, went up to her, took her in her
arms, and rocked her gently to and fro as if she were a baby.

When they were gone a student asked:

"How long d'you think she'll last, sir?"

Dr. Tyrell shrugged his shoulders.

"Her brother and sister died within three months of the first symptoms.
She'll do the same. If they were rich one might do something. You can't
tell these people to go to St. Moritz. Nothing can be done for them."

Once a man who was strong and in all the power of his manhood came because
a persistent aching troubled him and his club-doctor did not seem to do
him any good; and the verdict for him too was death, not the inevitable
death that horrified and yet was tolerable because science was helpless
before it, but the death which was inevitable because the man was a little
wheel in the great machine of a complex civilisation, and had as little
power of changing the circumstances as an automaton. Complete rest was his
only chance. The physician did not ask impossibilities.

"You ought to get some very much lighter job."

"There ain't no light jobs in my business."

"Well, if you go on like this you'll kill yourself. You're very ill."

"D'you mean to say I'm going to die?"

"I shouldn't like to say that, but you're certainly unfit for hard work."

"If I don't work who's to keep the wife and the kids?"

Dr. Tyrell shrugged his shoulders. The dilemma had been presented to him
a hundred times. Time was pressing and there were many patients to be
seen.

"Well, I'll give you some medicine and you can come back in a week and
tell me how you're getting on."

The man took his letter with the useless prescription written upon it and
walked out. The doctor might say what he liked. He did not feel so bad
that he could not go on working. He had a good job and he could not afford
to throw it away.

"I give him a year," said Dr. Tyrell.

Sometimes there was comedy. Now and then came a flash of cockney humour,
now and then some old lady, a character such as Charles Dickens might have
drawn, would amuse them by her garrulous oddities. Once a woman came who
was a member of the ballet at a famous music-hall. She looked fifty, but
gave her age as twenty-eight. She was outrageously painted and ogled the
students impudently with large black eyes; her smiles were grossly
alluring. She had abundant self-confidence and treated Dr. Tyrell, vastly
amused, with the easy familiarity with which she might have used an
intoxicated admirer. She had chronic bronchitis, and told him it hindered
her in the exercise of her profession.

"I don't know why I should 'ave such a thing, upon my word I don't. I've
never 'ad a day's illness in my life. You've only got to look at me to
know that."

She rolled her eyes round the young men, with a long sweep of her painted
eyelashes, and flashed her yellow teeth at them. She spoke with a cockney
accent, but with an affectation of refinement which made every word a
feast of fun.

"It's what they call a winter cough," answered Dr. Tyrell gravely. "A
great many middle-aged women have it."

"Well, I never! That is a nice thing to say to a lady. No one ever called
me middle-aged before."

She opened her eyes very wide and cocked her head on one side, looking at
him with indescribable archness.

"That is the disadvantage of our profession," said he. "It forces us
sometimes to be ungallant."

She took the prescription and gave him one last, luscious smile.

"You will come and see me dance, dearie, won't you?"

"I will indeed."

He rang the bell for the next case.

"I am glad you gentlemen were here to protect me."

But on the whole the impression was neither of tragedy nor of comedy.
There was no describing it. It was manifold and various; there were tears
and laughter, happiness and woe; it was tedious and interesting and
indifferent; it was as you saw it: it was tumultuous and passionate; it
was grave; it was sad and comic; it was trivial; it was simple and
complex; joy was there and despair; the love of mothers for their
children, and of men for women; lust trailed itself through the rooms with
leaden feet, punishing the guilty and the innocent, helpless wives and
wretched children; drink seized men and women and cost its inevitable
price; death sighed in these rooms; and the beginning of life, filling
some poor girl with terror and shame, was diagnosed there. There was
neither good nor bad there. There were just facts. It was life.

LXXXII

Towards the end of the year, when Philip was bringing to a close his three
months as clerk in the out-patients' department, he received a letter from
Lawson, who was in Paris.

Dear Philip,

Cronshaw is in London and would be glad to see you. He is living at 43
Hyde Street, Soho. I don't know where it is, but I daresay you will be
able to find out. Be a brick and look after him a bit. He is very down on
his luck. He will tell you what he is doing. Things are going on here very
much as usual. Nothing seems to have changed since you were here. Clutton
is back, but he has become quite impossible. He has quarrelled with
everybody. As far as I can make out he hasn't got a cent, he lives in a
little studio right away beyond the Jardin des Plantes, but he won't let
anybody see his work. He doesn't show anywhere, so one doesn't know what
he is doing. He may be a genius, but on the other hand he may be off his
head. By the way, I ran against Flanagan the other day. He was showing
Mrs. Flanagan round the Quarter. He has chucked art and is now in popper's
business. He seems to be rolling. Mrs. Flanagan is very pretty and I'm
trying to work a portrait. How much would you ask if you were me? I don't
want to frighten them, and then on the other hand I don't want to be such
an ass as to ask L150 if they're quite willing to give L300.

                                              Yours ever,
                                                   Frederick Lawson.

Philip wrote to Cronshaw and received in reply the following letter. It
was written on a half-sheet of common note-paper, and the flimsy envelope
was dirtier than was justified by its passage through the post.

Dear Carey,

Of course I remember you very well. I have an idea that I had some part in
rescuing you from the Slough of Despond in which myself am hopelessly
immersed. I shall be glad to see you. I am a stranger in a strange city
and I am buffeted by the philistines. It will be pleasant to talk of
Paris. I do not ask you to come and see me, since my lodging is not of a
magnificence fit for the reception of an eminent member of Monsieur
Purgon's profession, but you will find me eating modestly any evening
between seven and eight at a restaurant yclept Au Bon Plaisir in Dean
Street.

                                          Your sincere
                                                  J. Cronshaw.

Philip went the day he received this letter. The restaurant, consisting of
one small room, was of the poorest class, and Cronshaw seemed to be its
only customer. He was sitting in the corner, well away from draughts,
wearing the same shabby great-coat which Philip had never seen him
without, with his old bowler on his head.

"I eat here because I can be alone," he said. "They are not doing well;
the only people who come are a few trollops and one or two waiters out of
a job; they are giving up business, and the food is execrable. But the
ruin of their fortunes is my advantage."

Cronshaw had before him a glass of absinthe. It was nearly three years
since they had met, and Philip was shocked by the change in his
appearance. He had been rather corpulent, but now he had a dried-up,
yellow look: the skin of his neck was loose and winkled; his clothes hung
about him as though they had been bought for someone else; and his collar,
three or four sizes too large, added to the slatternliness of his
appearance. His hands trembled continually. Philip remembered the
handwriting which scrawled over the page with shapeless, haphazard
letters. Cronshaw was evidently very ill.

"I eat little these days," he said. "I'm very sick in the morning. I'm
just having some soup for my dinner, and then I shall have a bit of
cheese."

Philip's glance unconsciously went to the absinthe, and Cronshaw, seeing
it, gave him the quizzical look with which he reproved the admonitions of
common sense.

"You have diagnosed my case, and you think it's very wrong of me to drink
absinthe."

"You've evidently got cirrhosis of the liver," said Philip.

"Evidently."

He looked at Philip in the way which had formerly had the power of making
him feel incredibly narrow. It seemed to point out that what he was
thinking was distressingly obvious; and when you have agreed with the
obvious what more is there to say? Philip changed the topic.

"When are you going back to Paris?"

"I'm not going back to Paris. I'm going to die."

The very naturalness with which he said this startled Philip. He thought
of half a dozen things to say, but they seemed futile. He knew that
Cronshaw was a dying man.

"Are you going to settle in London then?" he asked lamely.

"What is London to me? I am a fish out of water. I walk through the
crowded streets, men jostle me, and I seem to walk in a dead city. I felt
that I couldn't die in Paris. I wanted to die among my own people. I don't
know what hidden instinct drew me back at the last."

Philip knew of the woman Cronshaw had lived with and the two
draggle-tailed children, but Cronshaw had never mentioned them to him, and
he did not like to speak of them. He wondered what had happened to them.

"I don't know why you talk of dying," he said.

"I had pneumonia a couple of winters ago, and they told me then it was a
miracle that I came through. It appears I'm extremely liable to it, and
another bout will kill me."

"Oh, what nonsense! You're not so bad as all that. You've only got to take
precautions. Why don't you give up drinking?"

"Because I don't choose. It doesn't matter what a man does if he's ready
to take the consequences. Well, I'm ready to take the consequences. You
talk glibly of giving up drinking, but it's the only thing I've got left
now. What do you think life would be to me without it? Can you understand
the happiness I get out of my absinthe? I yearn for it; and when I drink
it I savour every drop, and afterwards I feel my soul swimming in
ineffable happiness. It disgusts you. You are a puritan and in your heart
you despise sensual pleasures. Sensual pleasures are the most violent and
the most exquisite. I am a man blessed with vivid senses, and I have
indulged them with all my soul. I have to pay the penalty now, and I am
ready to pay."

Philip looked at him for a while steadily.

"Aren't you afraid?"

For a moment Cronshaw did not answer. He seemed to consider his reply.

"Sometimes, when I'm alone." He looked at Philip. "You think that's a
condemnation? You're wrong. I'm not afraid of my fear. It's folly, the
Christian argument that you should live always in view of your death. The
only way to live is to forget that you're going to die. Death is
unimportant. The fear of it should never influence a single action of the
wise man. I know that I shall die struggling for breath, and I know that
I shall be horribly afraid. I know that I shall not be able to keep myself
from regretting bitterly the life that has brought me to such a pass; but
I disown that regret. I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still
my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing."

"D'you remember that Persian carpet you gave me?" asked Philip.

Cronshaw smiled his old, slow smile of past days.

"I told you that it would give you an answer to your question when you
asked me what was the meaning of life. Well, have you discovered the
answer?"

"No," smiled Philip. "Won't you tell it me?"

"No, no, I can't do that. The answer is meaningless unless you discover it
for yourself."

LXXXIII

Cronshaw was publishing his poems. His friends had been urging him to do
this for years, but his laziness made it impossible for him to take the
necessary steps. He had always answered their exhortations by telling them
that the love of poetry was dead in England. You brought out a book which
had cost you years of thought and labour; it was given two or three
contemptuous lines among a batch of similar volumes, twenty or thirty
copies were sold, and the rest of the edition was pulped. He had long
since worn out the desire for fame. That was an illusion like all else.
But one of his friends had taken the matter into his own hands. This was
a man of letters, named Leonard Upjohn, whom Philip had met once or twice
with Cronshaw in the cafes of the Quarter. He had a considerable
reputation in England as a critic and was the accredited exponent in this
country of modern French literature. He had lived a good deal in France
among the men who made the Mercure de France the liveliest review of the
day, and by the simple process of expressing in English their point of
view he had acquired in England a reputation for originality. Philip had
read some of his articles. He had formed a style for himself by a close
imitation of Sir Thomas Browne; he used elaborate sentences, carefully
balanced, and obsolete, resplendent words: it gave his writing an
appearance of individuality. Leonard Upjohn had induced Cronshaw to give
him all his poems and found that there were enough to make a volume of
reasonable size. He promised to use his influence with publishers.
Cronshaw was in want of money. Since his illness he had found it more
difficult than ever to work steadily; he made barely enough to keep
himself in liquor; and when Upjohn wrote to him that this publisher and
the other, though admiring the poems, thought it not worth while to
publish them, Cronshaw began to grow interested. He wrote impressing upon
Upjohn his great need and urging him to make more strenuous efforts. Now
that he was going to die he wanted to leave behind him a published book,
and at the back of his mind was the feeling that he had produced great
poetry. He expected to burst upon the world like a new star. There was
something fine in keeping to himself these treasures of beauty all his
life and giving them to the world disdainfully when, he and the world
parting company, he had no further use for them.

His decision to come to England was caused directly by an announcement
from Leonard Upjohn that a publisher had consented to print the poems. By
a miracle of persuasion Upjohn had persuaded him to give ten pounds in
advance of royalties.

"In advance of royalties, mind you," said Cronshaw to Philip. "Milton only
got ten pounds down."

Upjohn had promised to write a signed article about them, and he would ask
his friends who reviewed to do their best. Cronshaw pretended to treat the
matter with detachment, but it was easy to see that he was delighted with
the thought of the stir he would make.

One day Philip went to dine by arrangement at the wretched eating-house at
which Cronshaw insisted on taking his meals, but Cronshaw did not appear.
Philip learned that he had not been there for three days. He got himself
something to eat and went round to the address from which Cronshaw had
first written to him. He had some difficulty in finding Hyde Street. It
was a street of dingy houses huddled together; many of the windows had
been broken and were clumsily repaired with strips of French newspaper;
the doors had not been painted for years; there were shabby little shops
on the ground floor, laundries, cobblers, stationers. Ragged children
played in the road, and an old barrel-organ was grinding out a vulgar
tune. Philip knocked at the door of Cronshaw's house (there was a shop of
cheap sweetstuffs at the bottom), and it was opened by an elderly
Frenchwoman in a dirty apron. Philip asked her if Cronshaw was in.

"Ah, yes, there is an Englishman who lives at the top, at the back. I
don't know if he's in. If you want him you had better go up and see."

The staircase was lit by one jet of gas. There was a revolting odour in
the house. When Philip was passing up a woman came out of a room on the
first floor, looked at him suspiciously, but made no remark. There were
three doors on the top landing. Philip knocked at one, and knocked again;
there was no reply; he tried the handle, but the door was locked. He
knocked at another door, got no answer, and tried the door again. It
opened. The room was dark.

"Who's that?"

He recognised Cronshaw's voice.

"Carey. Can I come in?"

He received no answer. He walked in. The window was closed and the stink
was overpowering. There was a certain amount of light from the arc-lamp in
the street, and he saw that it was a small room with two beds in it, end
to end; there was a washing-stand and one chair, but they left little
space for anyone to move in. Cronshaw was in the bed nearest the window.
He made no movement, but gave a low chuckle.

"Why don't you light the candle?" he said then.

Philip struck a match and discovered that there was a candlestick on the
floor beside the bed. He lit it and put it on the washing-stand. Cronshaw
was lying on his back immobile; he looked very odd in his nightshirt; and
his baldness was disconcerting. His face was earthy and death-like.

"I say, old man, you look awfully ill. Is there anyone to look after you
here?"

"George brings me in a bottle of milk in the morning before he goes to his
work."

"Who's George?"

"I call him George because his name is Adolphe. He shares this palatial
apartment with me."

Philip noticed then that the second bed had not been made since it was
slept in. The pillow was black where the head had rested.

"You don't mean to say you're sharing this room with somebody else?" he
cried.

"Why not? Lodging costs money in Soho. George is a waiter, he goes out at
eight in the morning and does not come in till closing time, so he isn't
in my way at all. We neither of us sleep well, and he helps to pass away
the hours of the night by telling me stories of his life. He's a Swiss,
and I've always had a taste for waiters. They see life from an
entertaining angle."

"How long have you been in bed?"

"Three days."

"D'you mean to say you've had nothing but a bottle of milk for the last
three days? Why on earth didn't you send me a line? I can't bear to think
of you lying here all day long without a soul to attend to you."

Cronshaw gave a little laugh.

"Look at your face. Why, dear boy, I really believe you're distressed. You
nice fellow."

Philip blushed. He had not suspected that his face showed the dismay he
felt at the sight of that horrible room and the wretched circumstances of
the poor poet. Cronshaw, watching Philip, went on with a gentle smile.

"I've been quite happy. Look, here are my proofs. Remember that I am
indifferent to discomforts which would harass other folk. What do the
circumstances of life matter if your dreams make you lord paramount of
time and space?"

The proofs were lying on his bed, and as he lay in the darkness he had
been able to place his hands on them. He showed them to Philip and his
eyes glowed. He turned over the pages, rejoicing in the clear type; he
read out a stanza.

"They don't look bad, do they?"

Philip had an idea. It would involve him in a little expense and he could
not afford even the smallest increase of expenditure; but on the other
hand this was a case where it revolted him to think of economy.

"I say, I can't bear the thought of your remaining here. I've got an extra
room, it's empty at present, but I can easily get someone to lend me a
bed. Won't you come and live with me for a while? It'll save you the rent
of this."

"Oh, my dear boy, you'd insist on my keeping my window open."

"You shall have every window in the place sealed if you like."

"I shall be all right tomorrow. I could have got up today, only I felt
lazy."

"Then you can very easily make the move. And then if you don't feel well
at any time you can just go to bed, and I shall be there to look after
you."

"If it'll please you I'll come," said Cronshaw, with his torpid not
unpleasant smile.

"That'll be ripping."

They settled that Philip should fetch Cronshaw next day, and Philip
snatched an hour from his busy morning to arrange the change. He found
Cronshaw dressed, sitting in his hat and great-coat on the bed, with a
small, shabby portmanteau, containing his clothes and books, already
packed: it was on the floor by his feet, and he looked as if he were
sitting in the waiting-room of a station. Philip laughed at the sight of
him. They went over to Kennington in a four-wheeler, of which the windows
were carefully closed, and Philip installed his guest in his own room. He
had gone out early in the morning and bought for himself a second-hand
bedstead, a cheap chest of drawers, and a looking-glass. Cronshaw settled
down at once to correct his proofs. He was much better.

Philip found him, except for the irritability which was a symptom of his
disease, an easy guest. He had a lecture at nine in the morning, so did
not see Cronshaw till the night. Once or twice Philip persuaded him to
share the scrappy meal he prepared for himself in the evening, but
Cronshaw was too restless to stay in, and preferred generally to get
himself something to eat in one or other of the cheapest restaurants in
Soho. Philip asked him to see Dr. Tyrell, but he stoutly refused; he knew
a doctor would tell him to stop drinking, and this he was resolved not to
do. He always felt horribly ill in the morning, but his absinthe at
mid-day put him on his feet again, and by the time he came home, at
midnight, he was able to talk with the brilliancy which had astonished
Philip when first he made his acquaintance. His proofs were corrected; and
the volume was to come out among the publications of the early spring,
when the public might be supposed to have recovered from the avalanche of
Christmas books.

LXXXIV

At the new year Philip became dresser in the surgical out-patients'
department. The work was of the same character as that which he had just
been engaged on, but with the greater directness which surgery has than
medicine; and a larger proportion of the patients suffered from those two
diseases which a supine public allows, in its prudishness, to be spread
broadcast. The assistant-surgeon for whom Philip dressed was called
Jacobs. He was a short, fat man, with an exuberant joviality, a bald head,
and a loud voice; he had a cockney accent, and was generally described by
the students as an `awful bounder'; but his cleverness, both as a surgeon
and as a teacher, caused some of them to overlook this. He had also a
considerable facetiousness, which he exercised impartially on the patients
and on the students. He took a great pleasure in making his dressers look
foolish. Since they were ignorant, nervous, and could not answer as if he
were their equal, this was not very difficult. He enjoyed his afternoons,
with the home truths he permitted himself, much more than the students who
had to put up with them with a smile. One day a case came up of a boy with
a club-foot. His parents wanted to know whether anything could be done.
Mr. Jacobs turned to Philip.

"You'd better take this case, Carey. It's a subject you ought to know
something about."

Philip flushed, all the more because the surgeon spoke obviously with a
humorous intention, and his brow-beaten dressers laughed obsequiously. It
was in point of fact a subject which Philip, since coming to the hospital,
had studied with anxious attention. He had read everything in the library
which treated of talipes in its various forms. He made the boy take off
his boot and stocking. He was fourteen, with a snub nose, blue eyes, and
a freckled face. His father explained that they wanted something done if
possible, it was such a hindrance to the kid in earning his living. Philip
looked at him curiously. He was a jolly boy, not at all shy, but talkative
and with a cheekiness which his father reproved. He was much interested in
his foot.

"It's only for the looks of the thing, you know," he said to Philip. "I
don't find it no trouble."

"Be quiet, Ernie," said his father. "There's too much gas about you."

Philip examined the foot and passed his hand slowly over the shapelessness
of it. He could not understand why the boy felt none of the humiliation
which always oppressed himself. He wondered why he could not take his
deformity with that philosophic indifference. Presently Mr. Jacobs came up
to him. The boy was sitting on the edge of a couch, the surgeon and Philip
stood on each side of him; and in a semi-circle, crowding round, were
students. With accustomed brilliancy Jacobs gave a graphic little
discourse upon the club-foot: he spoke of its varieties and of the forms
which followed upon different anatomical conditions.

"I suppose you've got talipes equinus?" he said, turning suddenly to
Philip.

"Yes."

Philip felt the eyes of his fellow-students rest on him, and he cursed
himself because he could not help blushing. He felt the sweat start up in
the palms of his hands. The surgeon spoke with the fluency due to long
practice and with the admirable perspicacity which distinguished him. He
was tremendously interested in his profession. But Philip did not listen.
He was only wishing that the fellow would get done quickly. Suddenly he
realised that Jacobs was addressing him.

"You don't mind taking off your sock for a moment, Carey?"

Philip felt a shudder pass through him. He had an impulse to tell the
surgeon to go to hell, but he had not the courage to make a scene. He
feared his brutal ridicule. He forced himself to appear indifferent.

"Not a bit," he said.

He sat down and unlaced his boot. His fingers were trembling and he
thought he should never untie the knot. He remembered how they had forced
him at school to show his foot, and the misery which had eaten into his
soul.

"He keeps his feet nice and clean, doesn't he?" said Jacobs, in his
rasping, cockney voice.

The attendant students giggled. Philip noticed that the boy whom they were
examining looked down at his foot with eager curiosity. Jacobs took the
foot in his hands and said:

"Yes, that's what I thought. I see you've had an operation. When you were
a child, I suppose?"

He went on with his fluent explanations. The students leaned over and
looked at the foot. Two or three examined it minutely when Jacobs let it
go.

"When you've quite done," said Philip, with a smile, ironically.

He could have killed them all. He thought how jolly it would be to jab a
chisel (he didn't know why that particular instrument came into his mind)
into their necks. What beasts men were! He wished he could believe in hell
so as to comfort himself with the thought of the horrible tortures which
would be theirs. Mr. Jacobs turned his attention to treatment. He talked
partly to the boy's father and partly to the students. Philip put on his
sock and laced his boot. At last the surgeon finished. But he seemed to
have an afterthought and turned to Philip.

"You know, I think it might be worth your while to have an operation. Of
course I couldn't give you a normal foot, but I think I can do something.
You might think about it, and when you want a holiday you can just come
into the hospital for a bit."

Philip had often asked himself whether anything could be done, but his
distaste for any reference to the subject had prevented him from
consulting any of the surgeons at the hospital. His reading told him that
whatever might have been done when he was a small boy, and then treatment
of talipes was not as skilful as in the present day, there was small
chance now of any great benefit. Still it would be worth while if an
operation made it possible for him to wear a more ordinary boot and to
limp less. He remembered how passionately he had prayed for the miracle
which his uncle had assured him was possible to omnipotence. He smiled
ruefully.

"I was rather a simple soul in those days," he thought.

Towards the end of February it was clear that Cronshaw was growing much
worse. He was no longer able to get up. He lay in bed, insisting that the
window should be closed always, and refused to see a doctor; he would take
little nourishment, but demanded whiskey and cigarettes: Philip knew that
he should have neither, but Cronshaw's argument was unanswerable.

"I daresay they are killing me. I don't care. You've warned me, you've
done all that was necessary: I ignore your warning. Give me something to
drink and be damned to you."

Leonard Upjohn blew in two or three times a week, and there was something
of the dead leaf in his appearance which made the word exactly descriptive
of the manner of his appearance. He was a weedy-looking fellow of
five-and-thirty, with long pale hair and a white face; he had the look of
a man who lived too little in the open air. He wore a hat like a
dissenting minister's. Philip disliked him for his patronising manner and
was bored by his fluent conversation. Leonard Upjohn liked to hear himself
talk. He was not sensitive to the interest of his listeners, which is the
first requisite of the good talker; and he never realised that he was
telling people what they knew already. With measured words he told Philip
what to think of Rodin, Albert Samain, and Caesar Franck. Philip's
charwoman only came in for an hour in the morning, and since Philip was
obliged to be at the hospital all day Cronshaw was left much alone. Upjohn
told Philip that he thought someone should remain with him, but did not
offer to make it possible.

"It's dreadful to think of that great poet alone. Why, he might die
without a soul at hand."

"I think he very probably will," said Philip.

"How can you be so callous!"

"Why don't you come and do your work here every day, and then you'd be
near if he wanted anything?" asked Philip drily.

"I? My dear fellow, I can only work in the surroundings I'm used to, and
besides I go out so much."

Upjohn was also a little put out because Philip had brought Cronshaw to
his own rooms.

"I wish you had left him in Soho," he said, with a wave of his long, thin
hands. "There was a touch of romance in that sordid attic. I could even
bear it if it were Wapping or Shoreditch, but the respectability of
Kennington! What a place for a poet to die!"

Cronshaw was often so ill-humoured that Philip could only keep his temper
by remembering all the time that this irritability was a symptom of the
disease. Upjohn came sometimes before Philip was in, and then Cronshaw
would complain of him bitterly. Upjohn listened with complacency.

"The fact is that Carey has no sense of beauty," he smiled. "He has a
middle-class mind."

He was very sarcastic to Philip, and Philip exercised a good deal of
self-control in his dealings with him. But one evening he could not
contain himself. He had had a hard day at the hospital and was tired out.
Leonard Upjohn came to him, while he was making himself a cup of tea in
the kitchen, and said that Cronshaw was complaining of Philip's insistence
that he should have a doctor.

"Don't you realise that you're enjoying a very rare, a very exquisite
privilege? You ought to do everything in your power, surely, to show your
sense of the greatness of your trust."

"It's a rare and exquisite privilege which I can ill afford," said Philip.

Whenever there was any question of money, Leonard Upjohn assumed a
slightly disdainful expression. His sensitive temperament was offended by
the reference.

"There's something fine in Cronshaw's attitude, and you disturb it by your
importunity. You should make allowances for the delicate imaginings which
you cannot feel."

Philip's face darkened.

"Let us go in to Cronshaw," he said frigidly.

The poet was lying on his back, reading a book, with a pipe in his mouth.
The air was musty; and the room, notwithstanding Philip's tidying up, had
the bedraggled look which seemed to accompany Cronshaw wherever he went.
He took off his spectacles as they came in. Philip was in a towering rage.

"Upjohn tells me you've been complaining to him because I've urged you to
have a doctor," he said. "I want you to have a doctor, because you may die
any day, and if you hadn't been seen by anyone I shouldn't be able to get
a certificate. There'd have to be an inquest and I should be blamed for
not calling a doctor in."

"I hadn't thought of that. I thought you wanted me to see a doctor for my
sake and not for your own. I'll see a doctor whenever you like."

Philip did not answer, but gave an almost imperceptible shrug of the
shoulders. Cronshaw, watching him, gave a little chuckle.

"Don't look so angry, my dear. I know very well you want to do everything
you can for me. Let's see your doctor, perhaps he can do something for me,
and at any rate it'll comfort you." He turned his eyes to Upjohn. "You're
a damned fool, Leonard. Why d'you want to worry the boy? He has quite
enough to do to put up with me. You'll do nothing more for me than write
a pretty article about me after my death. I know you."

Next day Philip went to Dr. Tyrell. He felt that he was the sort of man to
be interested by the story, and as soon as Tyrell was free of his day's
work he accompanied Philip to Kennington. He could only agree with what
Philip had told him. The case was hopeless.

"I'll take him into the hospital if you like," he said. "He can have a
small ward."

"Nothing would induce him to come."

"You know, he may die any minute, or else he may get another attack of
pneumonia."

Philip nodded. Dr. Tyrell made one or two suggestions, and promised to
come again whenever Philip wanted him to. He left his address. When Philip
went back to Cronshaw he found him quietly reading. He did not trouble to
inquire what the doctor had said.

"Are you satisfied now, dear boy?" he asked.

"I suppose nothing will induce you to do any of the things Tyrell
advised?"

"Nothing," smiled Cronshaw.

LXXXV

About a fortnight after this Philip, going home one evening after his
day's work at the hospital, knocked at the door of Cronshaw's room. He got
no answer and walked in. Cronshaw was lying huddled up on one side, and
Philip went up to the bed. He did not know whether Cronshaw was asleep or
merely lay there in one of his uncontrollable fits of irritability. He was
surprised to see that his mouth was open. He touched his shoulder. Philip
gave a cry of dismay. He slipped his hand under Cronshaw's shirt and felt
his heart; he did not know what to do; helplessly, because he had heard of
this being done, he held a looking-glass in front of his mouth. It
startled him to be alone with Cronshaw. He had his hat and coat still on,
and he ran down the stairs into the street; he hailed a cab and drove to
Harley Street. Dr. Tyrell was in.

"I say, would you mind coming at once? I think Cronshaw's dead."

"If he is it's not much good my coming, is it?"

"I should be awfully grateful if you would. I've got a cab at the door.
It'll only take half an hour."

Tyrell put on his hat. In the cab he asked him one or two questions.

"He seemed no worse than usual when I left this morning," said Philip. "It
gave me an awful shock when I went in just now. And the thought of his
dying all alone.... D'you think he knew he was going to die?"

Philip remembered what Cronshaw had said. He wondered whether at that last
moment he had been seized with the terror of death. Philip imagined
himself in such a plight, knowing it was inevitable and with no one, not
a soul, to give an encouraging word when the fear seized him.

"You're rather upset," said Dr. Tyrell.

He looked at him with his bright blue eyes. They were not unsympathetic.
When he saw Cronshaw, he said:

"He must have been dead for some hours. I should think he died in his
sleep. They do sometimes."

The body looked shrunk and ignoble. It was not like anything human. Dr.
Tyrell looked at it dispassionately. With a mechanical gesture he took out
his watch.

"Well, I must be getting along. I'll send the certificate round. I suppose
you'll communicate with the relatives."

"I don't think there are any," said Philip.

"How about the funeral?"

"Oh, I'll see to that."

Dr. Tyrell gave Philip a glance. He wondered whether he ought to offer a
couple of sovereigns towards it. He knew nothing of Philip's
circumstances; perhaps he could well afford the expense; Philip might
think it impertinent if he made any suggestion.

"Well, let me know if there's anything I can do," he said.

Philip and he went out together, parting on the doorstep, and Philip went
to a telegraph office in order to send a message to Leonard Upjohn. Then
he went to an undertaker whose shop he passed every day on his way to the
hospital. His attention had been drawn to it often by the three words in
silver lettering on a black cloth, which, with two model coffins, adorned
the window: Economy, Celerity, Propriety. They had always diverted him.
The undertaker was a little fat Jew with curly black hair, long and
greasy, in black, with a large diamond ring on a podgy finger. He received
Philip with a peculiar manner formed by the mingling of his natural
blatancy with the subdued air proper to his calling. He quickly saw that
Philip was very helpless and promised to send round a woman at once to
perform the needful offices. His suggestions for the funeral were very
magnificent; and Philip felt ashamed of himself when the undertaker seemed
to think his objections mean. It was horrible to haggle on such a matter,
and finally Philip consented to an expensiveness which he could ill
afford.

"I quite understand, sir," said the undertaker, "you don't want any show
and that--I'm not a believer in ostentation myself, mind you--but you want
it done gentlemanly-like. You leave it to me, I'll do it as cheap as it
can be done, 'aving regard to what's right and proper. I can't say more
than that, can I?"

Philip went home to eat his supper, and while he ate the woman came along
to lay out the corpse. Presently a telegram arrived from Leonard Upjohn.

Shocked and grieved beyond measure. Regret cannot come tonight. Dining
out. With you early tomorrow. Deepest sympathy. Upjohn.

In a little while the woman knocked at the door of the sitting-room.

"I've done now, sir. Will you come and look at 'im and see it's all
right?"

Philip followed her. Cronshaw was lying on his back, with his eyes closed
and his hands folded piously across his chest.

"You ought by rights to 'ave a few flowers, sir."

"I'll get some tomorrow."

She gave the body a glance of satisfaction. She had performed her job, and
now she rolled down her sleeves, took off her apron, and put on her
bonnet. Philip asked her how much he owed her.

"Well, sir, some give me two and sixpence and some give me five
shillings."

Philip was ashamed to give her less than the larger sum. She thanked him
with just so much effusiveness as was seemly in presence of the grief he
might be supposed to feel, and left him. Philip went back into his
sitting-room, cleared away the remains of his supper, and sat down to read
Walsham's Surgery. He found it difficult. He felt singularly nervous.
When there was a sound on the stairs he jumped, and his heart beat
violently. That thing in the adjoining room, which had been a man and now
was nothing, frightened him. The silence seemed alive, as if some
mysterious movement were taking place within it; the presence of death
weighed upon these rooms, unearthly and terrifying: Philip felt a sudden
horror for what had once been his friend. He tried to force himself to
read, but presently pushed away his book in despair. What troubled him was
the absolute futility of the life which had just ended. It did not matter
if Cronshaw was alive or dead. It would have been just as well if he had
never lived. Philip thought of Cronshaw young; and it needed an effort of
imagination to picture him slender, with a springing step, and with hair
on his head, buoyant and hopeful. Philip's rule of life, to follow one's
instincts with due regard to the policeman round the corner, had not acted
very well there: it was because Cronshaw had done this that he had made
such a lamentable failure of existence. It seemed that the instincts could
not be trusted. Philip was puzzled, and he asked himself what rule of life
was there, if that one was useless, and why people acted in one way rather
than in another. They acted according to their emotions, but their
emotions might be good or bad; it seemed just a chance whether they led to
triumph or disaster. Life seemed an inextricable confusion. Men hurried
hither and thither, urged by forces they knew not; and the purpose of it
all escaped them; they seemed to hurry just for hurrying's sake.

Next morning Leonard Upjohn appeared with a small wreath of laurel. He was
pleased with his idea of crowning the dead poet with this; and attempted,
notwithstanding Philip's disapproving silence, to fix it on the bald head;
but the wreath fitted grotesquely. It looked like the brim of a hat worn
by a low comedian in a music-hall.

"I'll put it over his heart instead," said Upjohn.

"You've put it on his stomach," remarked Philip.

Upjohn gave a thin smile.

"Only a poet knows where lies a poet's heart," he answered.

They went back into the sitting-room, and Philip told him what
arrangements he had made for the funeral.

"I hoped you've spared no expense. I should like the hearse to be followed
by a long string of empty coaches, and I should like the horses to wear
tall nodding plumes, and there should be a vast number of mutes with long
streamers on their hats. I like the thought of all those empty coaches."

"As the cost of the funeral will apparently fall on me and I'm not over
flush just now, I've tried to make it as moderate as possible."

"But, my dear fellow, in that case, why didn't you get him a pauper's
funeral? There would have been something poetic in that. You have an
unerring instinct for mediocrity."

Philip flushed a little, but did not answer; and next day he and Upjohn
followed the hearse in the one carriage which Philip had ordered. Lawson,
unable to come, had sent a wreath; and Philip, so that the coffin should
not seem too neglected, had bought a couple. On the way back the coachman
whipped up his horses. Philip was dog-tired and presently went to sleep.
He was awakened by Upjohn's voice.

"It's rather lucky the poems haven't come out yet. I think we'd better
hold them back a bit and I'll write a preface. I began thinking of it
during the drive to the cemetery. I believe I can do something rather
good. Anyhow I'll start with an article in The Saturday."

Philip did not reply, and there was silence between them. At last Upjohn
said:

"I daresay I'd be wiser not to whittle away my copy. I think I'll do an
article for one of the reviews, and then I can just print it afterwards as
a preface."

Philip kept his eye on the monthlies, and a few weeks later it appeared.
The article made something of a stir, and extracts from it were printed in
many of the papers. It was a very good article, vaguely biographical, for
no one knew much of Cronshaw's early life, but delicate, tender, and
picturesque. Leonard Upjohn in his intricate style drew graceful little
pictures of Cronshaw in the Latin Quarter, talking, writing poetry:
Cronshaw became a picturesque figure, an English Verlaine; and Leonard
Upjohn's coloured phrases took on a tremulous dignity, a more pathetic
grandiloquence, as he described the sordid end, the shabby little room in
Soho; and, with a reticence which was wholly charming and suggested a much
greater generosity than modesty allowed him to state, the efforts he made
to transport the Poet to some cottage embowered with honeysuckle amid a
flowering orchard. And the lack of sympathy, well-meaning but so tactless,
which had taken the poet instead to the vulgar respectability of
Kennington! Leonard Upjohn described Kennington with that restrained
humour which a strict adherence to the vocabulary of Sir Thomas Browne
necessitated. With delicate sarcasm he narrated the last weeks, the
patience with which Cronshaw bore the well-meaning clumsiness of the young
student who had appointed himself his nurse, and the pitifulness of that
divine vagabond in those hopelessly middle-class surroundings. Beauty from
ashes, he quoted from Isaiah. It was a triumph of irony for that outcast
poet to die amid the trappings of vulgar respectability; it reminded
Leonard Upjohn of Christ among the Pharisees, and the analogy gave him
opportunity for an exquisite passage. And then he told how a friend--his
good taste did not suffer him more than to hint subtly who the friend was
with such gracious fancies--had laid a laurel wreath on the dead poet's
heart; and the beautiful dead hands had seemed to rest with a voluptuous
passion upon Apollo's leaves, fragrant with the fragrance of art, and more
green than jade brought by swart mariners from the manifold, inexplicable
China. And, an admirable contrast, the article ended with a description of
the middle-class, ordinary, prosaic funeral of him who should have been
buried like a prince or like a pauper. It was the crowning buffet, the
final victory of Philistia over art, beauty, and immaterial things.

Leonard Upjohn had never written anything better. It was a miracle of
charm, grace, and pity. He printed all Cronshaw's best poems in the course
of the article, so that when the volume appeared much of its point was
gone; but he advanced his own position a good deal. He was thenceforth a
critic to be reckoned with. He had seemed before a little aloof; but there
was a warm humanity about this article which was infinitely attractive.

LXXXVI

In the spring Philip, having finished his dressing in the out-patients'
department, became an in-patients' clerk. This appointment lasted six
months. The clerk spent every morning in the wards, first in the men's,
then in the women's, with the house-physician; he wrote up cases, made
tests, and passed the time of day with the nurses. On two afternoons a
week the physician in charge went round with a little knot of students,
examined the cases, and dispensed information. The work had not the
excitement, the constant change, the intimate contact with reality, of the
work in the out-patients' department; but Philip picked up a good deal of
knowledge. He got on very well with the patients, and he was a little
flattered at the pleasure they showed in his attendance on them. He was
not conscious of any deep sympathy in their sufferings, but he liked them;
and because he put on no airs he was more popular with them than others of
the clerks. He was pleasant, encouraging, and friendly. Like everyone
connected with hospitals he found that male patients were more easy to get
on with than female. The women were often querulous and ill-tempered. They
complained bitterly of the hard-worked nurses, who did not show them the
attention they thought their right; and they were troublesome, ungrateful,
and rude.

Presently Philip was fortunate enough to make a friend. One morning the
house-physician gave him a new case, a man; and, seating himself at the
bedside, Philip proceeded to write down particulars on the `letter.' He
noticed on looking at this that the patient was described as a journalist:
his name was Thorpe Athelny, an unusual one for a hospital patient, and
his age was forty-eight. He was suffering from a sharp attack of jaundice,
and had been taken into the ward on account of obscure symptoms which it
seemed necessary to watch. He answered the various questions which it was
Philip's duty to ask him in a pleasant, educated voice. Since he was lying
in bed it was difficult to tell if he was short or tall, but his small
head and small hands suggested that he was a man of less than average
height. Philip had the habit of looking at people's hands, and Athelny's
astonished him: they were very small, with long, tapering fingers and
beautiful, rosy finger-nails; they were very smooth and except for the
jaundice would have been of a surprising whiteness. The patient kept them
outside the bed-clothes, one of them slightly spread out, the second and
third fingers together, and, while he spoke to Philip, seemed to
contemplate them with satisfaction. With a twinkle in his eyes Philip
glanced at the man's face. Notwithstanding the yellowness it was
distinguished; he had blue eyes, a nose of an imposing boldness, hooked,
aggressive but not clumsy, and a small beard, pointed and gray: he was
rather bald, but his hair had evidently been quite fine, curling prettily,
and he still wore it long.

"I see you're a journalist," said Philip. "What papers d'you write for?"

"I write for all the papers. You cannot open a paper without seeing some
of my writing." There was one by the side of the bed and reaching for it
he pointed out an advertisement. In large letters was the name of a firm
well-known to Philip, Lynn and Sedley, Regent Street, London; and below,
in type smaller but still of some magnitude, was the dogmatic statement:
Procrastination is the Thief of Time. Then a question, startling because
of its reasonableness: Why not order today? There was a repetition, in
large letters, like the hammering of conscience on a murderer's heart: Why
not? Then, boldly: Thousands of pairs of gloves from the leading markets
of the world at astounding prices. Thousands of pairs of stockings from
the most reliable manufacturers of the universe at sensational reductions.
Finally the question recurred, but flung now like a challenging gauntlet
in the lists: Why not order today?

"I'm the press representative of Lynn and Sedley." He gave a little wave
of his beautiful hand. "To what base uses..."

Philip went on asking the regulation questions, some a mere matter of
routine, others artfully devised to lead the patient to discover things
which he might be expected to desire to conceal.

"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.

"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 in the
photographs you had the impression of a troubling reality. Athelny was
describing eagerly, with vivid phrases, but Philip only heard vaguely what
he said. He was puzzled. He was curiously moved. These pictures seemed to
offer some meaning to him, but he did not know what the meaning was. There
were portraits of men with large, melancholy eyes which seemed to say you
knew not what; there were long monks in the Franciscan habit or in the
Dominican, with distraught faces, making gestures whose sense escaped you;
there was an Assumption of the Virgin; there was a Crucifixion in which
the painter by some magic of feeling had been able to suggest that the
flesh of Christ's dead body was not human flesh only but divine; and there
was an Ascension in which the Saviour seemed to surge up towards the
empyrean and yet to stand upon the air as steadily as though it were solid
ground: the uplifted arms of the Apostles, the sweep of their draperies,
their ecstatic gestures, gave an impression of exultation and of holy joy.
The background of nearly all was the sky by night, the dark night of the
soul, with wild clouds swept by strange winds of hell and lit luridly by
an uneasy moon.

"I've seen that sky in Toledo over and over again," said Athelny. "I have
an idea that when first El Greco came to the city it was by such a night,
and it made so vehement an impression upon him that he could never get
away from it."

Philip remembered how Clutton had been affected by this strange master,
whose work he now saw for the first time. He thought that Clutton was the
most interesting of all the people he had known in Paris. His sardonic
manner, his hostile aloofness, had made it difficult to know him; but it
seemed to Philip, looking back, that there had been in him a tragic force,
which sought vainly to express itself in painting. He was a man of unusual
character, mystical after the fashion of a time that had no leaning to
mysticism, who was impatient with life because he found himself unable to
say the things which the obscure impulses of his heart suggested. His
intellect was not fashioned to the uses of the spirit. It was not
surprising that he felt a deep sympathy with the Greek who had devised a
new technique to express the yearnings of his soul. Philip looked again at
the series of portraits of Spanish gentlemen, with ruffles and pointed
beards, their faces pale against the sober black of their clothes and the
darkness of the background. El Greco was the painter of the soul; and
these gentlemen, wan and wasted, not by exhaustion but by restraint, with
their tortured minds, seem to walk unaware of the beauty of the world; for
their eyes look only in their hearts, and they are dazzled by the glory of
the unseen. No painter has shown more pitilessly that the world is but a
place of passage. The souls of the men he painted speak their strange
longings through their eyes: their senses are miraculously acute, not for
sounds and odours and colour, but for the very subtle sensations of the
soul. The noble walks with the monkish heart within him, and his eyes see
things which saints in their cells see too, and he is unastounded. His
lips are not lips that smile.

Philip, silent still, returned to the photograph of Toledo, which seemed
to him the most arresting picture of them all. He could not take his eyes
off it. He felt strangely that he was on the threshold of some new
discovery in life. He was tremulous with a sense of adventure. He thought
for an instant of the love that had consumed him: love seemed very trivial
beside the excitement which now leaped in his heart. The picture he looked
at was a long one, with houses crowded upon a hill; in one corner a boy
was holding a large map of the town; in another was a classical figure
representing the river Tagus; and in the sky was the Virgin surrounded by
angels. It was a landscape alien to all Philip's notion, for he had lived
in circles that worshipped exact realism; and yet here again, strangely to
himself, he felt a reality greater than any achieved by the masters in
whose steps humbly he had sought to walk. He heard Athelny say that the
representation was so precise that when the citizens of Toledo came to
look at the picture they recognised their houses. The painter had painted
exactly what he saw but he had seen with the eyes of the spirit. There was
something unearthly in that city of pale gray. It was a city of the soul
seen by a wan light that was neither that of night nor day. It stood on a
green hill, but of a green not of this world, and it was surrounded by
massive walls and bastions to be stormed by no machines or engines of
man's invention, but by prayer and fasting, by contrite sighs and by
mortifications of the flesh. It was a stronghold of God. Those gray houses
were made of no stone known to masons, there was something terrifying in
their aspect, and you did not know what men might live in them. You might
walk through the streets and be unamazed to find them all deserted, and
yet not empty; for you felt a presence invisible and yet manifest to every
inner sense. It was a mystical city in which the imagination faltered like
one who steps out of the light into darkness; the soul walked naked to and
fro, knowing the unknowable, and conscious strangely of experience,
intimate but inexpressible, of the absolute. And without surprise, in that
blue sky, real with a reality that not the eye but the soul confesses,
with its rack of light clouds driven by strange breezes, like the cries
and the sighs of lost souls, you saw the Blessed Virgin with a gown of red
and a cloak of blue, surrounded by winged angels. Philip felt that the
inhabitants of that city would have seen the apparition without
astonishment, reverent and thankful, and have gone their ways.

Athelny spoke of the mystical writers of Spain, of Teresa de Avila, San
Juan de la Cruz, Fray Luis de Leon; in all of them was that passion for
the unseen which Philip felt in the pictures of El Greco: they seemed to
have the power to touch the incorporeal and see the invisible. They were
Spaniards of their age, in whom were tremulous all the mighty exploits of
a great nation: their fancies were rich with the glories of America and
the green islands of the Caribbean Sea; in their veins was the power that
had come from age-long battling with the Moor; they were proud, for they
were masters of the world; and they felt in themselves the wide distances,
the tawny wastes, the snow-capped mountains of Castile, the sunshine and
the blue sky, and the flowering plains of Andalusia. Life was passionate
and manifold, and because it offered so much they felt a restless yearning
for something more; because they were human they were unsatisfied; and
they threw this eager vitality of theirs into a vehement striving after
the ineffable. Athelny was not displeased to find someone to whom he could
read the translations with which for some time he had amused his leisure;
and in his fine, vibrating voice he recited the canticle of the Soul and
Christ her lover, the lovely poem which begins with the words en una
noche oscura, and the noche serena of Fray Luis de Leon. He had
translated them quite simply, not without skill, and he had found words
which at all events suggested the rough-hewn grandeur of the original. The
pictures of El Greco explained them, and they explained the pictures.

Philip had cultivated a certain disdain for idealism. He had always had a
passion for life, and the idealism he had come across seemed to him for
the most part a cowardly shrinking from it. The idealist withdrew himself,
because he could not suffer the jostling of the human crowd; he had not
the strength to fight and so called the battle vulgar; he was vain, and
since his fellows would not take him at his own estimate, consoled himself
with despising his fellows. For Philip his type was Hayward, fair,
languid, too fat now and rather bald, still cherishing the remains of his
good looks and still delicately proposing to do exquisite things in the
uncertain future; and at the back of this were whiskey and vulgar amours
of the street. It was in reaction from what Hayward represented that
Philip clamoured for life as it stood; sordidness, vice, deformity, did
not offend him; he declared that he wanted man in his nakedness; and he
rubbed his hands when an instance came before him of meanness, cruelty,
selfishness, or lust: that was the real thing. In Paris he had learned
that there was neither ugliness nor beauty, but only truth: the search
after beauty was sentimental. Had he not painted an advertisement of
chocolat Menier in a landscape in order to escape from the tyranny of
prettiness?

But here he seemed to divine something new. He had been coming to it, all
hesitating, for some time, but only now was conscious of the fact; he felt
himself on the brink of a discovery. He felt vaguely that here was
something better than the realism which he had adored; but certainly it
was not the bloodless idealism which stepped aside from life in weakness;
it was too strong; it was virile; it accepted life in all its vivacity,
ugliness and beauty, squalor and heroism; it was realism still; but it was
realism carried to some higher pitch, in which facts were transformed by
the more vivid light in which they were seen. He seemed to see things more
profoundly through the grave eyes of those dead noblemen of Castile; and
the gestures of the saints, which at first had seemed wild and distorted,
appeared to have some mysterious significance. But he could not tell what
that significance was. It was like a message which it was very important
for him to receive, but it was given him in an unknown tongue, and he
could not understand. He was always seeking for a meaning in life, and
here it seemed to him that a meaning was offered; but it was obscure and
vague. He was profoundly troubled. He saw what looked like the truth as by
flashes of lightning on a dark, stormy night you might see a mountain
range. He seemed to see that a man need not leave his life to chance, but
that his will was powerful; he seemed to see that self-control might be as
passionate and as active as the surrender to passion; he seemed to see
that the inward life might be as manifold, as varied, as rich with
experience, as the life of one who conquered realms and explored unknown
lands.

LXXXIX

The conversation between Philip and Athelny was broken into by a clatter
up the stairs. Athelny opened the door for the children coming back from
Sunday school, and with laughter and shouting they came in. Gaily he asked
them what they had learned. Sally appeared for a moment, with instructions
from her mother that father was to amuse the children while she got tea
ready; and Athelny began to tell them one of Hans Andersen's stories. They
were not shy children, and they quickly came to the conclusion that Philip
was not formidable. Jane came and stood by him and presently settled
herself on his knees. It was the first time that Philip in his lonely life
had been present in a family circle: his eyes smiled as they rested on the
fair children engrossed in the fairy tale. The life of his new friend,
eccentric as it appeared at first glance, seemed now to have the beauty of
perfect naturalness. Sally came in once more.

"Now then, children, tea's ready," she said.

Jane slipped off Philip's knees, and they all went back to the kitchen.
Sally began to lay the cloth on the long Spanish table.

"Mother says, shall she come and have tea with you?" she asked. "I can
give the children their tea."

"Tell your mother that we shall be proud and honoured if she will favour
us with her company," said Athelny.

It seemed to Philip that he could never say anything without an oratorical
flourish.

"Then I'll lay for her," said Sally.

She came back again in a moment with a tray on which were a cottage loaf,
a slab of butter, and a jar of strawberry jam. While she placed the things
on the table her father chaffed her. He said it was quite time she was
walking out; he told Philip that she was very proud, and would have
nothing to do with aspirants to that honour who lined up at the door, two
by two, outside the Sunday school and craved the honour of escorting her
home.

"You do talk, father," said Sally, with her slow, good-natured smile.

"You wouldn't think to look at her that a tailor's assistant has enlisted
in the army because she would not say how d'you do to him and an
electrical engineer, an electrical engineer, mind you, has taken to drink
because she refused to share her hymn-book with him in church. I shudder
to think what will happen when she puts her hair up."

"Mother'll bring the tea along herself," said Sally.

"Sally never pays any attention to me," laughed Athelny, looking at her
with fond, proud eyes. "She goes about her business indifferent to wars,
revolutions, and cataclysms. What a wife she'll make to an honest man!"

Mrs. Athelny brought in the tea. She sat down and proceeded to cut bread
and butter. It amused Philip to see that she treated her husband as though
he were a child. She spread jam for him and cut up the bread and butter
into convenient slices for him to eat. She had taken off her hat; and in
her Sunday dress, which seemed a little tight for her, she looked like one
of the farmers' wives whom Philip used to call on sometimes with his uncle
when he was a small boy. Then he knew why the sound of her voice was
familiar to him. She spoke just like the people round Blackstable.

"What part of the country d'you come from?" he asked her.

"I'm a Kentish woman. I come from Ferne."

"I thought as much. My uncle's Vicar of Blackstable."

"That's a funny thing now," she said. "I was wondering in Church just now
whether you was any connection of Mr. Carey. Many's the time I've seen
'im. A cousin of mine married Mr. Barker of Roxley Farm, over by
Blackstable Church, and I used to go and stay there often when I was a
girl. Isn't that a funny thing now?"

She looked at him with a new interest, and a brightness came into her
faded eyes. She asked him whether he knew Ferne. It was a pretty village
about ten miles across country from Blackstable, and the Vicar had come
over sometimes to Blackstable for the harvest thanksgiving. She mentioned
names of various farmers in the neighbourhood. She was delighted to talk
again of the country in which her youth was spent, and it was a pleasure
to her to recall scenes and people that had remained in her memory with
the tenacity peculiar to her class. It gave Philip a queer sensation too.
A breath of the country-side seemed to be wafted into that panelled room
in the middle of London. He seemed to see the fat Kentish fields with
their stately elms; and his nostrils dilated with the scent of the air; it
is laden with the salt of the North Sea, and that makes it keen and sharp.

Philip did not leave the Athelnys' till ten o'clock. The children came in
to say good-night at eight and quite naturally put up their faces for
Philip to kiss. His heart went out to them. Sally only held out her hand.

"Sally never kisses gentlemen till she's seen them twice," said her
father.

"You must ask me again then," said Philip.

"You mustn't take any notice of what father says," remarked Sally, with a
smile.

"She's a most self-possessed young woman," added her parent.

They had supper of bread and cheese and beer, while Mrs. Athelny was
putting the children to bed; and when Philip went into the kitchen to bid
her good-night (she had been sitting there, resting herself and reading
The Weekly Despatch) she invited him cordially to come again.

"There's always a good dinner on Sundays so long as Athelny's in work,"
she said, "and it's a charity to come and talk to him."

On the following Saturday Philip received a postcard from Athelny saying
that they were expecting him to dinner next day; but fearing their means
were not such that Mr. Athelny would desire him to accept, Philip wrote
back that he would only come to tea. He bought a large plum cake so that
his entertainment should cost nothing. He found the whole family glad to
see him, and the cake completed his conquest of the children. He insisted
that they should all have tea together in the kitchen, and the meal was
noisy and hilarious.

Soon Philip got into the habit of going to Athelny's every Sunday. He
became a great favourite with the children, because he was simple and
unaffected and because it was so plain that he was fond of them. As soon
as they heard his ring at the door one of them popped a head out of window
to make sure it was he, and then they all rushed downstairs tumultuously
to let him in. They flung themselves into his arms. At tea they fought for
the privilege of sitting next to him. Soon they began to call him Uncle
Philip.

Athelny was very communicative, and little by little Philip learned the
various stages of his life. He had followed many occupations, and it
occurred to Philip that he managed to make a mess of everything he
attempted. He had been on a tea plantation in Ceylon and a traveller in
America for Italian wines; his secretaryship of the water company in
Toledo had lasted longer than any of his employments; he had been a
journalist and for some time had worked as police-court reporter for an
evening paper; he had been sub-editor of a paper in the Midlands and
editor of another on the Riviera. From all his occupations he had gathered
amusing anecdotes, which he told with a keen pleasure in his own powers of
entertainment. He had read a great deal, chiefly delighting in books which
were unusual; and he poured forth his stores of abstruse knowledge with
child-like enjoyment of the amazement of his hearers. Three or four years
before abject poverty had driven him to take the job of
press-representative to a large firm of drapers; and though he felt the
work unworthy his abilities, which he rated highly, the firmness of his
wife and the needs of his family had made him stick to it.

XC

When he left the Athelnys' Philip walked down Chancery Lane and along the
Strand to get a 'bus at the top of Parliament Street. One Sunday, when he
had known them about six weeks, he did this as usual, but he found the
Kennington 'bus full. It was June, but it had rained during the day and
the night was raw and cold. He walked up to Piccadilly Circus in order to
get a seat; the 'bus waited at the fountain, and when it arrived there
seldom had more than two or three people in it. This service ran every
quarter of an hour, and he had some time to wait. He looked idly at the
crowd. The public-houses were closing, and there were many people about.
His mind was busy with the ideas Athelny had the charming gift of
suggesting.

Suddenly his heart stood still. He saw Mildred. He had not thought of her
for weeks. She was crossing over from the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and
stopped at the shelter till a string of cabs passed by. She was watching
her opportunity and had no eyes for anything else. She wore a large black
straw hat with a mass of feathers on it and a black silk dress; at that
time it was fashionable for women to wear trains; the road was clear, and
Mildred crossed, her skirt trailing on the ground, and walked down
Piccadilly. Philip, his heart beating excitedly, followed her. He did not
wish to speak to her, but he wondered where she was going at that hour; he
wanted to get a look at her face. She walked slowly along and turned down
Air Street and so got through into Regent Street. She walked up again
towards the Circus. Philip was puzzled. He could not make out what she was
doing. Perhaps she was waiting for somebody, and he felt a great curiosity
to know who it was. She overtook a short man in a bowler hat, who was
strolling very slowly in the same direction as herself; she gave him a
sidelong glance as she passed. She walked a few steps more till she came
to Swan and Edgar's, then stopped and waited, facing the road. When the
man came up she smiled. The man stared at her for a moment, turned away
his head, and sauntered on. Then Philip understood.

He was overwhelmed with horror. For a moment he felt such a weakness in
his legs that he could hardly stand; then he walked after her quickly; he
touched her on the arm.

"Mildred."

She turned round with a violent start. He thought that she reddened, but
in the obscurity he could not see very well. For a while they stood and
looked at one another without speaking. At last she said:

"Fancy seeing you!"

He did not know what to answer; he was horribly shaken; and the phrases
that chased one another through his brain seemed incredibly melodramatic.

"It's awful," he gasped, almost to himself.

She did not say anything more, she turned away from him, and looked down
at the pavement. He felt that his face was distorted with misery.

"Isn't there anywhere we can go and talk?"

"I don't want to talk," she said sullenly. "Leave me alone, can't you?"

The thought struck him that perhaps she was in urgent need of money and
could not afford to go away at that hour.

"I've got a couple of sovereigns on me if you're hard up," he blurted out.

"I don't know what you mean. I was just walking along here on my way back
to my lodgings. I expected to meet one of the girls from where I work."

"For God's sake don't lie now," he said.

Then he saw that she was crying, and he repeated his question.

"Can't we go and talk somewhere? Can't I come back to your rooms?"

"No, you can't do that," she sobbed. "I'm not allowed to take gentlemen in
there. If you like I'll met you tomorrow."

He felt certain that she would not keep an appointment. He was not going
to let her go.

"No. You must take me somewhere now."

"Well, there is a room I know, but they'll charge six shillings for it."

"I don't mind that. Where is it?"

She gave him the address, and he called a cab. They drove to a shabby
street beyond the British Museum in the neighbourhood of the Gray's Inn
Road, and she stopped the cab at the corner.

"They don't like you to drive up to the door," she said.

They were the first words either of them had spoken since getting into the
cab. They walked a few yards and Mildred knocked three times, sharply, at
a door. Philip noticed in the fanlight a cardboard on which was an
announcement that apartments were to let. The door was opened quietly, and
an elderly, tall woman let them in. She gave Philip a stare and then spoke
to Mildred in an undertone. Mildred led Philip along a passage to a room
at the back. It was quite dark; she asked him for a match, and lit the
gas; there was no globe, and the gas flared shrilly. Philip saw that he
was in a dingy little bed-room with a suite of furniture, painted to look
like pine much too large for it; the lace curtains were very dirty; the
grate was hidden by a large paper fan. Mildred sank on the chair which
stood by the side of the chimney-piece. Philip sat on the edge of the bed.
He felt ashamed. He saw now that Mildred's cheeks were thick with rouge,
her eyebrows were blackened; but she looked thin and ill, and the red on
her cheeks exaggerated the greenish pallor of her skin. She stared at the
paper fan in a listless fashion. Philip could not think what to say, and
he had a choking in his throat as if he were going to cry. He covered his
eyes with his hands.

"My God, it is awful," he groaned.

"I don't know what you've got to fuss about. I should have thought you'd
have been rather pleased."

Philip did not answer, and in a moment she broke into a sob.

"You don't think I do it because I like it, do you?"

"Oh, my dear," he cried. "I'm so sorry, I'm so awfully sorry."

"That'll do me a fat lot of good."

Again Philip found nothing to say. He was desperately afraid of saying
anything which she might take for a reproach or a sneer.

"Where's the baby?" he asked at last.

"I've got her with me in London. I hadn't got the money to keep her on at
Brighton, so I had to take her. I've got a room up Highbury way. I told
them I was on the stage. It's a long way to have to come down to the West
End every day, but it's a rare job to find anyone who'll let to ladies at
all."

"Wouldn't they take you back at the shop?"

"I couldn't get any work to do anywhere. I walked my legs off looking for
work. I did get a job once, but I was off for a week because I was queer,
and when I went back they said they didn't want me any more. You can't
blame them either, can you? Them places, they can't afford to have girls
that aren't strong."

"You don't look very well now," said Philip.

"I wasn't fit to come out tonight, but I couldn't help myself, I wanted
the money. I wrote to Emil and told him I was broke, but he never even
answered the letter."

"You might have written to me."

"I didn't like to, not after what happened, and I didn't want you to know
I was in difficulties. I shouldn't have been surprised if you'd just told
me I'd only got what I deserved."

"You don't know me very well, do you, even now?"

For a moment he remembered all the anguish he had suffered on her account,
and he was sick with the recollection of his pain. But it was no more than
recollection. When he looked at her he knew that he no longer loved her.
He was very sorry for her, but he was glad to be free. Watching her
gravely, he asked himself why he had been so besotted with passion for
her.

"You're a gentleman in every sense of the word," she said. "You're the
only one I've ever met." She paused for a minute and then flushed. "I hate
asking you, Philip, but can you spare me anything?"

"It's lucky I've got some money on me. I'm afraid I've only got two
pounds."

He gave her the sovereigns.

"I'll pay you back, Philip."

"Oh, that's all right," he smiled. "You needn't worry."

He had said nothing that he wanted to say. They had talked as if the whole
thing were natural; and it looked as though she would go now, back to the
horror of her life, and he would be able to do nothing to prevent it. She
had got up to take the money, and they were both standing.

"Am I keeping you?" she asked. "I suppose you want to be getting home."

"No, I'm in no hurry," he answered.

"I'm glad to have a chance of sitting down."

Those words, with all they implied, tore his heart, and it was dreadfully
painful to see the weary way in which she sank back into the chair. The
silence lasted so long that Philip in his embarrassment lit a cigarette.

"It's very good of you not to have said anything disagreeable to me,
Philip. I thought you might say I didn't know what all."

He saw that she was crying again. He remembered how she had come to him
when Emil Miller had deserted her and how she had wept. The recollection
of her suffering and of his own humiliation seemed to render more
overwhelming the compassion he felt now.

"If I could only get out of it!" she moaned. "I hate it so. I'm unfit for
the life, I'm not the sort of girl for that. I'd do anything to get away
from it, I'd be a servant if I could. Oh, I wish I was dead."

And in pity for herself she broke down now completely. She sobbed
hysterically, and her thin body was shaken.

"Oh, you don't know what it is. Nobody knows till they've done it."

Philip could not bear to see her cry. He was tortured by the horror of her
position.

"Poor child," he whispered. "Poor child."

He was deeply moved. Suddenly he had an inspiration. It filled him with a
perfect ecstasy of happiness.

"Look here, if you want to get away from it, I've got an idea. I'm
frightfully hard up just now, I've got to be as economical as I can; but
I've got a sort of little flat now in Kennington and I've got a spare
room. If you like you and the baby can come and live there. I pay a woman
three and sixpence a week to keep the place clean and to do a little
cooking for me. You could do that and your food wouldn't come to much more
than the money I should save on her. It doesn't cost any more to feed two
than one, and I don't suppose the baby eats much."

She stopped crying and looked at him.

"D'you mean to say that you could take me back after all that's happened?"

Philip flushed a little in embarrassment at what he had to say.

"I don't want you to mistake me. I'm just giving you a room which doesn't
cost me anything and your food. I don't expect anything more from you than
that you should do exactly the same as the woman I have in does. Except
for that I don't want anything from you at all. I daresay you can cook
well enough for that."

She sprang to her feet and was about to come towards him.

"You are good to me, Philip."

"No, please stop where you are," he said hurriedly, putting out his hand
as though to push her away.

He did not know why it was, but he could not bear the thought that she
should touch him.

"I don't want to be anything more than a friend to you."

"You are good to me," she repeated. "You are good to me."

"Does that mean you'll come?"

"Oh, yes, I'd do anything to get away from this. You'll never regret what
you've done, Philip, never. When can I come, Philip?"

"You'd better come tomorrow."

Suddenly she burst into tears again.

"What on earth are you crying for now?" he smiled.

"I'm so grateful to you. I don't know how I can ever make it up to you?"

"Oh, that's all right. You'd better go home now."

He wrote out the address and told her that if she came at half past five
he would be ready for her. It was so late that he had to walk home, but it
did not seem a long way, for he was intoxicated with delight; he seemed to
walk on air.

XCI

Next day he got up early to make the room ready for Mildred. He told the
woman who had looked after him that he would not want her any more.
Mildred came about six, and Philip, who was watching from the window, went
down to let her in and help her to bring up the luggage: it consisted now
of no more than three large parcels wrapped in brown paper, for she had
been obliged to sell everything that was not absolutely needful. She wore
the same black silk dress she had worn the night before, and, though she
had now no rouge on her cheeks, there was still about her eyes the black
which remained after a perfunctory wash in the morning: it made her look
very ill. She was a pathetic figure as she stepped out of the cab with the
baby in her arms. She seemed a little shy, and they found nothing but
commonplace things to say to one another.

"So you've got here all right."

"I've never lived in this part of London before."

Philip showed her the room. It was that in which Cronshaw had died.
Philip, though he thought it absurd, had never liked the idea of going
back to it; and since Cronshaw's death he had remained in the little room,
sleeping on a fold-up bed, into which he had first moved in order to make
his friend comfortable. The baby was sleeping placidly.

"You don't recognise her, I expect," said Mildred.

"I've not seen her since we took her down to Brighton."

"Where shall I put her? She's so heavy I can't carry her very long."

"I'm afraid I haven't got a cradle," said Philip, with a nervous laugh.

"Oh, she'll sleep with me. She always does."

Mildred put the baby in an arm-chair and looked round the room. She
recognised most of the things which she had known in his old diggings.
Only one thing was new, a head and shoulders of Philip which Lawson had
painted at the end of the preceding summer; it hung over the
chimney-piece; Mildred looked at it critically.

"In some ways I like it and in some ways I don't. I think you're better
looking than that."

"Things are looking up," laughed Philip. "You've never told me I was
good-looking before."

"I'm not one to worry myself about a man's looks. I don't like
good-looking men. They're too conceited for me."

Her eyes travelled round the room in an instinctive search for a
looking-glass, but there was none; she put up her hand and patted her
large fringe.

"What'll the other people in the house say to my being here?" she asked
suddenly.

"Oh, there's only a man and his wife living here. He's out all day, and I
never see her except on Saturday to pay my rent. They keep entirely to
themselves. I've not spoken two words to either of them since I came."

Mildred went into the bedroom to undo her things and put them away. Philip
tried to read, but his spirits were too high: he leaned back in his chair,
smoking a cigarette, and with smiling eyes looked at the sleeping child.
He felt very happy. He was quite sure that he was not at all in love with
Mildred. He was surprised that the old feeling had left him so completely;
he discerned in himself a faint physical repulsion from her; and he
thought that if he touched her it would give him goose-flesh. He could not
understand himself. Presently, knocking at the door, she came in again.

"I say, you needn't knock," he said. "Have you made the tour of the
mansion?"

"It's the smallest kitchen I've ever seen."

"You'll find it large enough to cook our sumptuous repasts," he retorted
lightly.

"I see there's nothing in. I'd better go out and get something."

"Yes, but I venture to remind you that we must be devilish economical."

"What shall I get for supper?"

"You'd better get what you think you can cook," laughed Philip.

He gave her some money and she went out. She came in half an hour later
and put her purchases on the table. She was out of breath from climbing
the stairs.

"I say, you are anaemic," said Philip. "I'll have to dose you with Blaud's
Pills."

"It took me some time to find the shops. I bought some liver. That's
tasty, isn't it? And you can't eat much of it, so it's more economical
than butcher's meat."

There was a gas stove in the kitchen, and when she had put the liver on,
Mildred came into the sitting-room to lay the cloth.

"Why are you only laying one place?" asked Philip. "Aren't you going to
eat anything?"

Mildred flushed.

"I thought you mightn't like me to have my meals with you."

"Why on earth not?"

"Well, I'm only a servant, aren't I?"

"Don't be an ass. How can you be so silly?"

He smiled, but her humility gave him a curious twist in his heart. Poor
thing! He remembered what she had been when first he knew her. He
hesitated for an instant.

"Don't think I'm conferring any benefit on you," he said. "It's simply a
business arrangement, I'm giving you board and lodging in return for your
work. You don't owe me anything. And there's nothing humiliating to you in
it."

She did not answer, but tears rolled heavily down her cheeks. Philip knew
from his experience at the hospital that women of her class looked upon
service as degrading: he could not help feeling a little impatient with
her; but he blamed himself, for it was clear that she was tired and ill.
He got up and helped her to lay another place at the table. The baby was
awake now, and Mildred had prepared some Mellin's Food for it. The liver
and bacon were ready and they sat down. For economy's sake Philip had
given up drinking anything but water, but he had in the house a half a
bottle of whiskey, and he thought a little would do Mildred good. He did
his best to make the supper pass cheerfully, but Mildred was subdued and
exhausted. When they had finished she got up to put the baby to bed.

"I think you'll do well to turn in early yourself," said Philip. "You look
absolute done up."

"I think I will after I've washed up."

Philip lit his pipe and began to read. It was pleasant to hear somebody
moving about in the next room. Sometimes his loneliness had oppressed him.
Mildred came in to clear the table, and he heard the clatter of plates as
she washed up. Philip smiled as he thought how characteristic it was of
her that she should do all that in a black silk dress. But he had work to
do, and he brought his book up to the table. He was reading Osler's
Medicine, which had recently taken the place in the students' favour of
Taylor's work, for many years the text-book most in use. Presently Mildred
came in, rolling down her sleeves. Philip gave her a casual glance, but
did not move; the occasion was curious, and he felt a little nervous. He
feared that Mildred might imagine he was going to make a nuisance of
himself, and he did not quite know how without brutality to reassure her.

"By the way, I've got a lecture at nine, so I should want breakfast at a
quarter past eight. Can you manage that?"

"Oh, yes. Why, when I was in Parliament Street I used to catch the
eight-twelve from Herne Hill every morning."

"I hope you'll find your room comfortable. You'll be a different woman
tomorrow after a long night in bed."

"I suppose you work till late?"

"I generally work till about eleven or half-past."

"I'll say good-night then."

"Good-night."

The table was between them. He did not offer to shake hands with her. She
shut the door quietly. He heard her moving about in the bed-room, and in
a little while he heard the creaking of the bed as she got in.

XCII

The following day was Tuesday. Philip as usual hurried through his
breakfast and dashed off to get to his lecture at nine. He had only time
to exchange a few words with Mildred. When he came back in the evening he
found her seated at the window, darning his socks.

"I say, you are industrious," he smiled. "What have you been doing with
yourself all day?"

"Oh, I gave the place a good cleaning and then I took baby out for a
little."

She was wearing an old black dress, the same as she had worn as uniform
when she served in the tea-shop; it was shabby, but she looked better in
it than in the silk of the day before. The baby was sitting on the floor.
She looked up at Philip with large, mysterious eyes and broke into a laugh
when he sat down beside her and began playing with her bare toes. The
afternoon sun came into the room and shed a mellow light.

"It's rather jolly to come back and find someone about the place. A woman
and a baby make very good decoration in a room."

He had gone to the hospital dispensary and got a bottle of Blaud's Pills,
He gave them to Mildred and told her she must take them after each meal.
It was a remedy she was used to, for she had taken it off and on ever
since she was sixteen.

"I'm sure Lawson would love that green skin of yours," said Philip. "He'd
say it was so paintable, but I'm terribly matter of fact nowadays, and I
shan't be happy till you're as pink and white as a milkmaid."

"I feel better already."

After a frugal supper Philip filled his pouch with tobacco and put on his
hat. It was on Tuesdays that he generally went to the tavern in Beak
Street, and he was glad that this day came so soon after Mildred's
arrival, for he wanted to make his relations with her perfectly clear.

"Are you going out?" she said.

"Yes, on Tuesdays I give myself a night off. I shall see you tomorrow.
Good-night."

Philip always went to the tavern with a sense of pleasure. Macalister, the
philosophic stockbroker, was generally there and glad to argue upon any
subject under the sun; Hayward came regularly when he was in London; and
though he and Macalister disliked one another they continued out of habit
to meet on that one evening in the week. Macalister thought Hayward a poor
creature, and sneered at his delicacies of sentiment: he asked satirically
about Hayward's literary work and received with scornful smiles his vague
suggestions of future masterpieces; their arguments were often heated; but
the punch was good, and they were both fond of it; towards the end of the
evening they generally composed their differences and thought each other
capital fellows. This evening Philip found them both there, and Lawson
also; Lawson came more seldom now that he was beginning to know people in
London and went out to dinner a good deal. They were all on excellent
terms with themselves, for Macalister had given them a good thing on the
Stock Exchange, and Hayward and Lawson had made fifty pounds apiece. It
was a great thing for La