The winter passed. Now and then Philip went to the hospital, slinking
in when it was late and there was little chance of meeting anyone he
knew, to see whether there were letters for him. At Easter he received
one from his uncle. He was surprised to hear from him, for the Vicar of
Blackstable had never written him more than half a dozen letters in his
whole life, and they were on business matters.
Dear Philip,
If you are thinking of taking a holiday soon and care to come down here
I shall be pleased to see you. I was very ill with my bronchitis in the
winter and Doctor Wigram never expected me to pull through. I have a
wonderful constitution and I made, thank God, a marvellous recovery.
Yours affectionately,
William Carey.
The letter made Philip angry. How did his uncle think he was living? He
did not even trouble to inquire. He might have starved for all the old
man cared. But as he walked home something struck him; he stopped under
a lamp-post and read the letter again; the handwriting had no longer
the business-like firmness which had characterised it; it was larger
and wavering: perhaps the illness had shaken him more than he was
willing to confess, and he sought in that formal note to express a
yearning to see the only relation he had in the world. Philip wrote
back that he could come down to Blackstable for a fortnight in July.
The invitation was convenient, for he had not known what to do, with
his brief holiday. The Athelnys went hopping in September, but he could
not then be spared, since during that month the autumn models were
prepared. The rule of Lynn’s was that everyone must take a fortnight
whether he wanted it or not; and during that time, if he had nowhere to
go, the assistant might sleep in his room, but he was not allowed food.
A number had no friends within reasonable distance of London, and to
these the holiday was an awkward interval when they had to provide food
out of their small wages and, with the whole day on their hands, had
nothing to spend. Philip had not been out of London since his visit to
Brighton with Mildred, now two years before, and he longed for fresh
air and the silence of the sea. He thought of it with such a passionate
desire, all through May and June, that, when at length the time came
for him to go, he was listless.
On his last evening, when he talked with the buyer of one or two jobs
he had to leave over, Mr. Sampson suddenly said to him:
“What wages have you been getting?”
“Six shillings.”
“I don’t think it’s enough. I’ll see that you’re put up to twelve when
you come back.”
“Thank you very much,” smiled Philip. “I’m beginning to want some new
clothes badly.”
“If you stick to your work and don’t go larking about with the girls
like what some of them do, I’ll look after you, Carey. Mind you, you’ve
got a lot to learn, but you’re promising, I’ll say that for you, you’re
promising, and I’ll see that you get a pound a week as soon as you
deserve it.”
Philip wondered how long he would have to wait for that. Two years?
He was startled at the change in his uncle. When last he had seen him
he was a stout man, who held himself upright, clean-shaven, with a
round, sensual face; but he had fallen in strangely, his skin was
yellow; there were great bags under the eyes, and he was bent and old.
He had grown a beard during his last illness, and he walked very
slowly.
“I’m not at my best today,” he said when Philip, having just arrived,
was sitting with him in the dining-room. “The heat upsets me.”
Philip, asking after the affairs of the parish, looked at him and
wondered how much longer he could last. A hot summer would finish him;
Philip noticed how thin his hands were; they trembled. It meant so much
to Philip. If he died that summer he could go back to the hospital at
the beginning of the winter session; his heart leaped at the thought of
returning no more to Lynn’s. At dinner the Vicar sat humped up on his
chair, and the housekeeper who had been with him since his wife’s death
said:
“Shall Mr. Philip carve, sir?”
The old man, who had been about to do so from disinclination to confess
his weakness, seemed glad at the first suggestion to relinquish the
attempt.
“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.