Of Human Bondage (45 page)

  "But why don't you write about Spain?" cried Philip.
"It would be so much more interesting. You know the life."

  "But Paris is the only place worth writing about.
Paris is life."

  One day he brought part of the manuscript, and in
his bad French, translating excitedly as he went along so that
Philip could scarcely understand, he read passages. It was
lamentable. Philip, puzzled, looked at the picture he was painting:
the mind behind that broad brow was trivial; and the flashing,
passionate eyes saw nothing in life but the obvious. Philip was not
satisfied with his portrait, and at the end of a sitting he nearly
always scraped out what he had done. It was all very well to aim at
the intention of the soul: who could tell what that was when people
seemed a mass of contradictions? He liked Miguel, and it distressed
him to realise that his magnificent struggle was futile: he had
everything to make a good writer but talent. Philip looked at his
own work. How could you tell whether there was anything in it or
whether you were wasting your time? It was clear that the will to
achieve could not help you and confidence in yourself meant
nothing. Philip thought of Fanny Price; she had a vehement belief
in her talent; her strength of will was extraordinary.

  "If I thought I wasn't going to be really good, I'd
rather give up painting," said Philip. "I don't see any use in
being a second-rate painter."

  Then one morning when he was going out, the
concierge called out to him that there was a letter. Nobody wrote
to him but his Aunt Louisa and sometimes Hayward, and this was a
handwriting he did not know. The letter was as follows:

  Please come at once when you get this. I couldn't
put up with it any more. Please come yourself. I can't bear the
thought that anyone else should touch me. I want you to have
everything. F. Price

  I have not had anything to eat for three days.

  Philip felt on a sudden sick with fear. He hurried
to the house in which she lived. He was astonished that she was in
Paris at all. He had not seen her for months and imagined she had
long since returned to England. When he arrived he asked the
concierge whether she was in.

  "Yes, I've not seen her go out for two days."

  Philip ran upstairs and knocked at the door. There
was no reply. He called her name. The door was locked, and on
bending down he found the key was in the lock.

  "Oh, my God, I hope she hasn't done something
awful," he cried aloud.

  He ran down and told the porter that she was
certainly in the room. He had had a letter from her and feared a
terrible accident. He suggested breaking open the door. The porter,
who had been sullen and disinclined to listen, became alarmed; he
could not take the responsibility of breaking into the room; they
must go for the commissaire de police. They walked together to the
bureau, and then they fetched a locksmith. Philip found that Miss
Price had not paid the last quarter's rent: on New Year's Day she
had not given the concierge the present which old-established
custom led him to regard as a right. The four of them went
upstairs, and they knocked again at the door. There was no reply.
The locksmith set to work, and at last they entered the room.
Philip gave a cry and instinctively covered his eyes with his
hands. The wretched woman was hanging with a rope round her neck,
which she had tied to a hook in the ceiling fixed by some previous
tenant to hold up the curtains of the bed. She had moved her own
little bed out of the way and had stood on a chair, which had been
kicked away. it was lying on its side on the floor. They cut her
down. The body was quite cold.

  The story which Philip made out in one way and
another was terrible. One of the grievances of the women-students
was that Fanny Price would never share their gay meals in
restaurants, and the reason was obvious: she had been oppressed by
dire poverty. He remembered the luncheon they had eaten together
when first he came to Paris and the ghoulish appetite which had
disgusted him: he realised now that she ate in that manner because
she was ravenous. The concierge told him what her food had
consisted of. A bottle of milk was left for her every day and she
brought in her own loaf of bread; she ate half the loaf and drank
half the milk at mid-day when she came back from the school, and
consumed the rest in the evening. It was the same day after day.
Philip thought with anguish of what she must have endured. She had
never given anyone to understand that she was poorer than the rest,
but it was clear that her money had been coming to an end, and at
last she could not afford to come any more to the studio. The
little room was almost bare of furniture, and there were no other
clothes than the shabby brown dress she had always worn. Philip
searched among her things for the address of some friend with whom
he could communicate. He found a piece of paper on which his own
name was written a score of times. It gave him a peculiar shock. He
supposed it was true that she had loved him; he thought of the
emaciated body, in the brown dress, hanging from the nail in the
ceiling; and he shuddered. But if she had cared for him why did she
not let him help her? He would so gladly have done all he could. He
felt remorseful because he had refused to see that she looked upon
him with any particular feeling, and now these words in her letter
were infinitely pathetic: I can't bear the thought that anyone else
should touch me. She had died of starvation.

  Philip found at length a letter signed: your loving
brother, Albert. it was two or three weeks old, dated from some
road in Surbiton, and refused a loan of five pounds. The writer had
his wife and family to think of, he didn't feel justified in
lending money, and his advice was that Fanny should come back to
London and try to get a situation. Philip telegraphed to Albert
Price, and in a little while an answer came:

  "Deeply distressed. Very awkward to leave my
business. Is presence essential. Price."

  Philip wired a succinct affirmative, and next
morning a stranger presented himself at the studio.

  "My name's Price," he said, when Philip opened the
door.

  He was a commonish man in black with a band round
his bowler hat; he had something of Fanny's clumsy look; he wore a
stubbly moustache, and had a cockney accent. Philip asked him to
come in. He cast sidelong glances round the studio while Philip
gave him details of the accident and told him what he had done.

  "I needn't see her, need I?" asked Albert Price. "My
nerves aren't very strong, and it takes very little to upset
me."

  He began to talk freely. He was a rubber-merchant,
and he had a wife and three children. Fanny was a governess, and he
couldn't make out why she hadn't stuck to that instead of coming to
Paris.

  "Me and Mrs. Price told her Paris was no place for a
girl. And there's no money in art – never 'as been."

  It was plain enough that he had not been on friendly
terms with his sister, and he resented her suicide as a last injury
that she had done him. He did not like the idea that she had been
forced to it by poverty; that seemed to reflect on the family. The
idea struck him that possibly there was a more respectable reason
for her act.

  "I suppose she 'adn't any trouble with a man, 'ad
she? You know what I mean, Paris and all that. She might 'ave done
it so as not to disgrace herself."

  Philip felt himself reddening and cursed his
weakness. Price's keen little eyes seemed to suspect him of an
intrigue.

  "I believe your sister to have been perfectly
virtuous," he answered acidly. "She killed herself because she was
starving."

  "Well, it's very 'ard on her family, Mr. Carey. She
only 'ad to write to me. I wouldn't have let my sister want."

  Philip had found the brother's address only by
reading the letter in which he refused a loan; but he shrugged his
shoulders: there was no use in recrimination. He hated the little
man and wanted to have done with him as soon as possible. Albert
Price also wished to get through the necessary business quickly so
that he could get back to London. They went to the tiny room in
which poor Fanny had lived. Albert Price looked at the pictures and
the furniture.

  "I don't pretend to know much about art," he said.
"I suppose these pictures would fetch something, would they?"

  "Nothing," said Philip.

  "The furniture's not worth ten shillings."

  Albert Price knew no French and Philip had to do
everything. It seemed that it was an interminable process to get
the poor body safely hidden away under ground: papers had to be
obtained in one place and signed in another; officials had to be
seen. For three days Philip was occupied from morning till night.
At last he and Albert Price followed the hearse to the cemetery at
Montparnasse.

  "I want to do the thing decent," said Albert Price,
"but there's no use wasting money."

  The short ceremony was infinitely dreadful in the
cold gray morning. Half a dozen people who had worked with Fanny
Price at the studio came to the funeral, Mrs. Otter because she was
massiere and thought it her duty, Ruth Chalice because she had a
kind heart, Lawson, Clutton, and Flanagan. They had all disliked
her during her life. Philip, looking across the cemetery crowded on
all sides with monuments, some poor and simple, others vulgar,
pretentious, and ugly, shuddered. It was horribly sordid. When they
came out Albert Price asked Philip to lunch with him. Philip
loathed him now and he was tired; he had not been sleeping well,
for he dreamed constantly of Fanny Price in the torn brown dress,
hanging from the nail in the ceiling; but he could not think of an
excuse.

  "You take me somewhere where we can get a regular
slap-up lunch. All this is the very worst thing for my nerves."

  "Lavenue's is about the best place round here,"
answered Philip.

  Albert Price settled himself on a velvet seat with a
sigh of relief. He ordered a substantial luncheon and a bottle of
wine.

  "Well, I'm glad that's over," he said.

  He threw out a few artful questions, and Philip
discovered that he was eager to hear about the painter's life in
Paris. He represented it to himself as deplorable, but he was
anxious for details of the orgies which his fancy suggested to him.
With sly winks and discreet sniggering he conveyed that he knew
very well that there was a great deal more than Philip confessed.
He was a man of the world, and he knew a thing or two. He asked
Philip whether he had ever been to any of those places in
Montmartre which are celebrated from Temple Bar to the Royal
Exchange. He would like to say he had been to the Moulin Rouge. The
luncheon was very good and the wine excellent. Albert Price
expanded as the processes of digestion went satisfactorily
forwards.

  "Let's 'ave a little brandy," he said when the
coffee was brought, "and blow the expense."

  He rubbed his hands.

  "You know, I've got 'alf a mind to stay over tonight
and go back tomorrow. What d'you say to spending the evening
together?"

  "If you mean you want me to take you round
Montmartre tonight, I'll see you damned," said Philip.

  "I suppose it wouldn't be quite the thing."

  The answer was made so seriously that Philip was
tickled.

  "Besides it would be rotten for your nerves," he
said gravely.

  Albert Price concluded that he had better go back to
London by the four o'clock train, and presently he took leave of
Philip.

  "Well, good-bye, old man," he said. "I tell you
what, I'll try and come over to Paris again one of these days and
I'll look you up. And then we won't 'alf go on the razzle."

  Philip was too restless to work that afternoon, so
he jumped on a bus and crossed the river to see whether there were
any pictures on view at Durand-Ruel's. After that he strolled along
the boulevard. It was cold and wind-swept. People hurried by
wrapped up in their coats, shrunk together in an effort to keep out
of the cold, and their faces were pinched and careworn. It was icy
underground in the cemetery at Montparnasse among all those white
tombstones. Philip felt lonely in the world and strangely homesick.
He wanted company. At that hour Cronshaw would be working, and
Clutton never welcomed visitors; Lawson was painting another
portrait of Ruth Chalice and would not care to be disturbed. He
made up his mind to go and see Flanagan. He found him painting, but
delighted to throw up his work and talk. The studio was
comfortable, for the American had more money than most of them, and
warm; Flanagan set about making tea. Philip looked at the two heads
that he was sending to the Salon.