Of Human Bondage (6 page)

  This was not quite accurate, for he had been kept
awake by his own thoughts; and Philip, listening sullenly,
reflected that he had only made a noise once, and there was no
reason why his uncle should not have slept before or after. When
Mrs. Carey asked for an explanation the Vicar narrated the
facts.

  "He hasn't even said he was sorry," he finished.

  "Oh, Philip, I'm sure you're sorry," said Mrs.
Carey, anxious that the child should not seem wickeder to his uncle
than need be.

  Philip did not reply. He went on munching his bread
and butter. He did not know what power it was in him that prevented
him from making any expression of regret. He felt his ears
tingling, he was a little inclined to cry, but no word would issue
from his lips.

  "You needn't make it worse by sulking," said Mr.
Carey.

  Tea was finished in silence. Mrs. Carey looked at
Philip surreptitiously now and then, but the Vicar elaborately
ignored him. When Philip saw his uncle go upstairs to get ready for
church he went into the hall and got his hat and coat, but when the
Vicar came downstairs and saw him, he said:

  "I don't wish you to go to church tonight, Philip. I
don't think you're in a proper frame of mind to enter the House of
God."

  Philip did not say a word. He felt it was a deep
humiliation that was placed upon him, and his cheeks reddened. He
stood silently watching his uncle put on his broad hat and his
voluminous cloak. Mrs. Carey as usual went to the door to see him
off. Then she turned to Philip.

  "Never mind, Philip, you won't be a naughty boy next
Sunday, will you, and then your uncle will take you to church with
him in the evening."

  She took off his hat and coat, and led him into the
dining-room.

  "Shall you and I read the service together, Philip,
and we'll sing the hymns at the harmonium. Would you like
that?"

  Philip shook his head decidedly. Mrs. Carey was
taken aback. If he would not read the evening service with her she
did not know what to do with him.

  "Then what would you like to do until your uncle
comes back?" she asked helplessly.

  Philip broke his silence at last.

  "I want to be left alone," he said.

  "Philip, how can you say anything so unkind? Don't
you know that your uncle and I only want your good? Don't you love
me at all?"

  "I hate you. I wish you was dead."

  Mrs. Carey gasped. He said the words so savagely
that it gave her quite a start. She had nothing to say. She sat
down in her husband's chair; and as she thought of her desire to
love the friendless, crippled boy and her eager wish that he should
love her – she was a barren woman and, even though it was clearly
God's will that she should be childless, she could scarcely bear to
look at little children sometimes, her heart ached so – the tears
rose to her eyes and one by one, slowly, rolled down her cheeks.
Philip watched her in amazement. She took out her handkerchief, and
now she cried without restraint. Suddenly Philip realised that she
was crying because of what he had said, and he was sorry. He went
up to her silently and kissed her. It was the first kiss he had
ever given her without being asked. And the poor lady, so small in
her black satin, shrivelled up and sallow, with her funny corkscrew
curls, took the little boy on her lap and put her arms around him
and wept as though her heart would break. But her tears were partly
tears of happiness, for she felt that the strangeness between them
was gone. She loved him now with a new love because he had made her
suffer.

  On the following Sunday, when the Vicar was making
his preparations to go into the drawing-room for his nap – all the
actions of his life were conducted with ceremony – and Mrs. Carey
was about to go upstairs, Philip asked:

  "What shall I do if I'm not allowed to play?"

  "Can't you sit still for once and be quiet?"

  "I can't sit still till tea-time."

  Mr. Carey looked out of the window, but it was cold
and raw, and he could not suggest that Philip should go into the
garden.

  "I know what you can do. You can learn by heart the
collect for the day."

  He took the prayer-book which was used for prayers
from the harmonium, and turned the pages till he came to the place
he wanted.

  "It's not a long one. If you can say it without a
mistake when I come in to tea you shall have the top of my
egg."

  Mrs. Carey drew up Philip's chair to the dining-room
table – they had bought him a high chair by now – and placed the
book in front of him.

  "The devil finds work for idle hands to do," said
Mr. Carey.

  He put some more coals on the fire so that there
should be a cheerful blaze when he came in to tea, and went into
the drawing-room. He loosened his collar, arranged the cushions,
and settled himself comfortably on the sofa. But thinking the
drawing-room a little chilly, Mrs. Carey brought him a rug from the
hall; she put it over his legs and tucked it round his feet. She
drew the blinds so that the light should not offend his eyes, and
since he had closed them already went out of the room on tiptoe.
The Vicar was at peace with himself today, and in ten minutes he
was asleep. He snored softly.

  It was the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, and the
collect began with the words: O God, whose blessed Son was
manifested that he might destroy the works of the devil, and make
us the sons of God, and heirs of Eternal life. Philip read it
through. He could make no sense of it. He began saying the words
aloud to himself, but many of them were unknown to him, and the
construction of the sentence was strange. He could not get more
than two lines in his head. And his attention was constantly
wandering: there were fruit trees trained on the walls of the
vicarage, and a long twig beat now and then against the windowpane;
sheep grazed stolidly in the field beyond the garden. It seemed as
though there were knots inside his brain. Then panic seized him
that he would not know the words by tea-time, and he kept on
whispering them to himself quickly; he did not try to understand,
but merely to get them parrot-like into his memory.

  Mrs. Carey could not sleep that afternoon, and by
four o'clock she was so wide awake that she came downstairs. She
thought she would hear Philip his collect so that he should make no
mistakes when he said it to his uncle. His uncle then would be
pleased; he would see that the boy's heart was in the right place.
But when Mrs. Carey came to the dining-room and was about to go in,
she heard a sound that made her stop suddenly. Her heart gave a
little jump. She turned away and quietly slipped out of the
front-door. She walked round the house till she came to the
dining-room window and then cautiously looked in. Philip was still
sitting on the chair she had put him in, but his head was on the
table buried in his arms, and he was sobbing desperately. She saw
the convulsive movement of his shoulders. Mrs. Carey was
frightened. A thing that had always struck her about the child was
that he seemed so collected. She had never seen him cry. And now
she realised that his calmness was some instinctive shame of
showing his fillings: he hid himself to weep.

  Without thinking that her husband disliked being
wakened suddenly, she burst into the drawing-room.

  "William, William," she said. "The boy's crying as
though his heart would break."

  Mr. Carey sat up and disentangled himself from the
rug about his legs.

  "What's he got to cry about?"

  "I don't know.... Oh, William, we can't let the boy
be unhappy. D'you think it's our fault? If we'd had children we'd
have known what to do."

  Mr. Carey looked at her in perplexity. He felt
extraordinarily helpless.

  "He can't be crying because I gave him the collect
to learn. It's not more than ten lines."

  "Don't you think I might take him some picture books
to look at, William? There are some of the Holy Land. There
couldn't be anything wrong in that."

  "Very well, I don't mind."

  Mrs. Carey went into the study. To collect books was
Mr. Carey's only passion, and he never went into Tercanbury without
spending an hour or two in the second-hand shop; he always brought
back four or five musty volumes. He never read them, for he had
long lost the habit of reading, but he liked to turn the pages,
look at the illustrations if they were illustrated, and mend the
bindings. He welcomed wet days because on them he could stay at
home without pangs of conscience and spend the afternoon with white
of egg and a glue-pot, patching up the Russia leather of some
battered quarto. He had many volumes of old travels, with steel
engravings, and Mrs. Carey quickly found two which described
Palestine. She coughed elaborately at the door so that Philip
should have time to compose himself, she felt that he would be
humiliated if she came upon him in the midst of his tears, then she
rattled the door handle. When she went in Philip was poring over
the prayer-book, hiding his eyes with his hands so that she might
not see he had been crying.

  "Do you know the collect yet?" she said.

  He did not answer for a moment, and she felt that he
did not trust his voice. She was oddly embarrassed.

  "I can't learn it by heart," he said at last, with a
gasp.

  "Oh, well, never mind," she said. "You needn't. I've
got some picture books for you to look at. Come and sit on my lap,
and we'll look at them together."

  Philip slipped off his chair and limped over to her.
He looked down so that she should not see his eyes. She put her
arms round him.

  "Look," she said, "that's the place where our
blessed Lord was born."

  She showed him an Eastern town with flat roofs and
cupolas and minarets. In the foreground was a group of palm-trees,
and under them were resting two Arabs and some camels. Philip
passed his hand over the picture as if he wanted to feel the houses
and the loose habiliments of the nomads.

  "Read what it says," he asked.

  Mrs. Carey in her even voice read the opposite page.
It was a romantic narrative of some Eastern traveller of the
thirties, pompous maybe, but fragrant with the emotion with which
the East came to the generation that followed Byron and
Chateaubriand. In a moment or two Philip interrupted her.

  "I want to see another picture."

  When Mary Ann came in and Mrs. Carey rose to help
her lay the cloth. Philip took the book in his hands and hurried
through the illustrations. It was with difficulty that his aunt
induced him to put the book down for tea. He had forgotten his
horrible struggle to get the collect by heart; he had forgotten his
tears. Next day it was raining, and he asked for the book again.
Mrs. Carey gave it him joyfully. Talking over his future with her
husband she had found that both desired him to take orders, and
this eagerness for the book which described places hallowed by the
presence of Jesus seemed a good sign. It looked as though the boy's
mind addressed itself naturally to holy things. But in a day or two
he asked for more books. Mr. Carey took him into his study, showed
him the shelf in which he kept illustrated works, and chose for him
one that dealt with Rome. Philip took it greedily. The pictures led
him to a new amusement. He began to read the page before and the
page after each engraving to find out what it was about, and soon
he lost all interest in his toys.

  Then, when no one was near, he took out books for
himself; and perhaps because the first impression on his mind was
made by an Eastern town, he found his chief amusement in those
which described the Levant. His heart beat with excitement at the
pictures of mosques and rich palaces; but there was one, in a book
on Constantinople, which peculiarly stirred his imagination. It was
called the Hall of the Thousand Columns. It was a Byzantine
cistern, which the popular fancy had endowed with fantastic
vastness; and the legend which he read told that a boat was always
moored at the entrance to tempt the unwary, but no traveller
venturing into the darkness had ever been seen again. And Philip
wondered whether the boat went on for ever through one pillared
alley after another or came at last to some strange mansion.