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.