Of Human Bondage (102 page)

  "You've got a very good appetite," said Philip.

  "Oh yes, I always eat well. But I'm thinner than
when you were here last. I'm glad to be thinner, I didn't like
being so fat. Dr. Wigram thinks I'm all the better for being
thinner than I was."

  When dinner was over the housekeeper brought him
some medicine.

  "Show the prescription to Master Philip," he said.
"He's a doctor too. I'd like him to see that he thinks it's all
right. I told Dr. Wigram that now you're studying to be a doctor he
ought to make a reduction in his charges. It's dreadful the bills
I've had to pay. He came every day for two months, and he charges
five shillings a visit. It's a lot of money, isn't it? He comes
twice a week still. I'm going to tell him he needn't come any more.
I'll send for him if I want him."

  He looked at Philip eagerly while he read the
prescriptions. They were narcotics. There were two of them, and one
was a medicine which the Vicar explained he was to use only if his
neuritis grew unendurable.

  "I'm very careful," he said. "I don't want to get
into the opium habit."

  He did not mention his nephew's affairs. Philip
fancied that it was by way of precaution, in case he asked for
money, that his uncle kept dwelling on the financial calls upon
him. He had spent so much on the doctor and so much more on the
chemist, while he was ill they had had to have a fire every day in
his bed-room, and now on Sunday he needed a carriage to go to
church in the evening as well as in the morning. Philip felt
angrily inclined to say he need not be afraid, he was not going to
borrow from him, but he held his tongue. It seemed to him that
everything had left the old man now but two things, pleasure in his
food and a grasping desire for money. It was a hideous old age.

  In the afternoon Dr. Wigram came, and after the
visit Philip walked with him to the garden gate.

  "How d'you think he is?" said Philip.

  Dr. Wigram was more anxious not to do wrong than to
do right, and he never hazarded a definite opinion if he could help
it. He had practised at Blackstable for five-and-thirty years. He
had the reputation of being very safe, and many of his patients
thought it much better that a doctor should be safe than clever.
There was a new man at Blackstable – he had been settled there for
ten years, but they still looked upon him as an interloper – and he
was said to be very clever; but he had not much practice among the
better people, because no one really knew anything about him.

  "Oh, he's as well as can be expected," said Dr.
Wigram in answer to Philip's inquiry.

  "Has he got anything seriously the matter with
him?"

  "Well, Philip, your uncle is no longer a young man,"
said the doctor with a cautious little smile, which suggested that
after all the Vicar of Blackstable was not an old man either.

  "He seems to think his heart's in a bad way."

  "I'm not satisfied with his heart," hazarded the
doctor, "I think he should be careful, very careful."

  On the tip of Philip's tongue was the question: how
much longer can he live? He was afraid it would shock. In these
matters a periphrase was demanded by the decorum of life, but, as
he asked another question instead, it flashed through him that the
doctor must be accustomed to the impatience of a sick man's
relatives. He must see through their sympathetic expressions.
Philip, with a faint smile at his own hypocrisy, cast down his
eyes.

  "I suppose he's in no immediate danger?"

  This was the kind of question the doctor hated. If
you said a patient couldn't live another month the family prepared
itself for a bereavement, and if then the patient lived on they
visited the medical attendant with the resentment they felt at
having tormented themselves before it was necessary. On the other
hand, if you said the patient might live a year and he died in a
week the family said you did not know your business. They thought
of all the affection they would have lavished on the defunct if
they had known the end was so near. Dr. Wigram made the gesture of
washing his hands.

  "I don't think there's any grave risk so long as he
– remains as he is," he ventured at last. "But on the other hand,
we mustn't forget that he's no longer a young man, and well, the
machine is wearing out. If he gets over the hot weather I don't see
why he shouldn't get on very comfortably till the winter, and then
if the winter does not bother him too much, well, I don't see why
anything should happen."

  Philip went back to the dining-room where his uncle
was sitting. With his skull-cap and a crochet shawl over his
shoulders he looked grotesque. His eyes had been fixed on the door,
and they rested on Philip's face as he entered. Philip saw that his
uncle had been waiting anxiously for his return.

  "Well, what did he say about me?"

  Philip understood suddenly that the old man was
frightened of dying. It made Philip a little ashamed, so that he
looked away involuntarily. He was always embarrassed by the
weakness of human nature.

  "He says he thinks you're much better," said
Philip.

  A gleam of delight came into his uncle's eyes.

  "I've got a wonderful constitution," he said. "What
else did he say?" he added suspiciously.

  Philip smiled.

  "He said that if you take care of yourself there's
no reason why you shouldn't live to be a hundred."

  "I don't know that I can expect to do that, but I
don't see why I shouldn't see eighty. My mother lived till she was
eighty-four."

  There was a little table by the side of Mr. Carey's
chair, and on it were a Bible and the large volume of the Common
Prayer from which for so many years he had been accustomed to read
to his household. He stretched out now his shaking hand and took
his Bible.

  "Those old patriarchs lived to a jolly good old age,
didn't they?" he said, with a queer little laugh in which Philip
read a sort of timid appeal.

  The old man clung to life. Yet he believed
implicitly all that his religion taught him. He had no doubt in the
immortality of the soul, and he felt that he had conducted himself
well enough, according to his capacities, to make it very likely
that he would go to heaven. In his long career to how many dying
persons must he have administered the consolations of religion!
Perhaps he was like the doctor who could get no benefit from his
own prescriptions. Philip was puzzled and shocked by that eager
cleaving to the earth. He wondered what nameless horror was at the
back of the old man's mind. He would have liked to probe into his
soul so that he might see in its nakedness the dreadful dismay of
the unknown which he suspected.

  The fortnight passed quickly and Philip returned to
London. He passed a sweltering August behind his screen in the
costumes department, drawing in his shirt sleeves. The assistants
in relays went for their holidays. In the evening Philip generally
went into Hyde Park and listened to the band. Growing more
accustomed to his work it tired him less, and his mind, recovering
from its long stagnation, sought for fresh activity. His whole
desire now was set on his uncle's death. He kept on dreaming the
same dream: a telegram was handed to him one morning, early, which
announced the Vicar's sudden demise, and freedom was in his grasp.
When he awoke and found it was nothing but a dream he was filled
with sombre rage. He occupied himself, now that the event seemed
likely to happen at any time, with elaborate plans for the future.
In these he passed rapidly over the year which he must spend before
it was possible for him to be qualified and dwelt on the journey to
Spain on which his heart was set. He read books about that country,
which he borrowed from the free library, and already he knew from
photographs exactly what each city looked like. He saw himself
lingering in Cordova on the bridge that spanned the Gaudalquivir;
he wandered through tortuous streets in Toledo and sat in churches
where he wrung from El Greco the secret which he felt the
mysterious painter held for him. Athelny entered into his humour,
and on Sunday afternoons they made out elaborate itineraries so
that Philip should miss nothing that was noteworthy. To cheat his
impatience Philip began to teach himself Spanish, and in the
deserted sitting-room in Harrington Street he spent an hour every
evening doing Spanish exercises and puzzling out with an English
translation by his side the magnificent phrases of Don Quixote.
Athelny gave him a lesson once a week, and Philip learned a few
sentences to help him on his journey. Mrs. Athelny laughed at
them.

  "You two and your Spanish!" she said. "Why don't you
do something useful?"

  But Sally, who was growing up and was to put up her
hair at Christmas, stood by sometimes and listened in her grave way
while her father and Philip exchanged remarks in a language she did
not understand. She thought her father the most wonderful man who
had ever existed, and she expressed her opinion of Philip only
through her father's commendations.

  "Father thinks a rare lot of your Uncle Philip," she
remarked to her brothers and sisters.

  Thorpe, the eldest boy, was old enough to go on the
Arethusa, and Athelny regaled his family with magnificent
descriptions of the appearance the lad would make when he came back
in uniform for his holidays. As soon as Sally was seventeen she was
to be apprenticed to a dressmaker. Athelny in his rhetorical way
talked of the birds, strong enough to fly now, who were leaving the
parental nest, and with tears in his eyes told them that the nest
would be there still if ever they wished to return to it. A
shakedown and a dinner would always be theirs, and the heart of a
father would never be closed to the troubles of his children.

  "You do talk, Athelny," said his wife. "I don't know
what trouble they're likely to get into so long as they're steady.
So long as you're honest and not afraid of work you'll never be out
of a job, that's what I think, and I can tell you I shan't be sorry
when I see the last of them earning their own living."

  Child-bearing, hard work, and constant anxiety were
beginning to tell on Mrs. Athelny; and sometimes her back ached in
the evening so that she had to sit down and rest herself. Her ideal
of happiness was to have a girl to do the rough work so that she
need not herself get up before seven. Athelny waved his beautiful
white hand.

  "Ah, my Betty, we've deserved well of the state, you
and I. We've reared nine healthy children, and the boys shall serve
their king; the girls shall cook and sew and in their turn breed
healthy children." He turned to Sally, and to comfort her for the
anti-climax of the contrast added grandiloquently: "They also serve
who only stand and wait."

  Athelny had lately added socialism to the other
contradictory theories he vehemently believed in, and he stated
now:

  "In a socialist state we should be richly pensioned,
you and I, Betty."

  "Oh, don't talk to me about your socialists, I've
got no patience with them," she cried. "It only means that another
lot of lazy loafers will make a good thing out of the working
classes. My motto is, leave me alone; I don't want anyone
interfering with me; I'll make the best of a bad job, and the devil
take the hindmost."

  "D'you call life a bad job?" said Athelny. "Never!
We've had our ups and downs, we've had our struggles, we've always
been poor, but it's been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I
say when I look round at my children."

  "You do talk, Athelny," she said, looking at him,
not with anger but with scornful calm. "You've had the pleasant
part of the children, I've had the bearing of them, and the bearing
with them. I don't say that I'm not fond of them, now they're
there, but if I had my time over again I'd remain single. Why, if
I'd remained single I might have a little shop by now, and four or
five hundred pounds in the bank, and a girl to do the rough work.
Oh, I wouldn't go over my life again, not for something."

  Philip thought of the countless millions to whom
life is no more than unending labour, neither beautiful nor ugly,
but just to be accepted in the same spirit as one accepts the
changes of the seasons. Fury seized him because it all seemed
useless. He could not reconcile himself to the belief that life had
no meaning and yet everything he saw, all his thoughts, added to
the force of his conviction. But though fury seized him it was a
joyful fury. life was not so horrible if it was meaningless, and he
faced it with a strange sense of power.