Of Human Bondage (83 page)

  Sally listened to all this with a slight, slow
smile, not much embarrassed, for she was accustomed to her father's
outbursts, but with an easy modesty which was very attractive.

  "Don't let your dinner get cold, father," she said,
drawing herself away from his arm. "You'll call when you're ready
for your pudding, won't you?"

  They were left alone, and Athelny lifted the pewter
tankard to his lips. He drank long and deep.

  "My word, is there anything better than English
beer?" he said. "Let us thank God for simple pleasures, roast beef
and rice pudding, a good appetite and beer. I was married to a lady
once. My God! Don't marry a lady, my boy."

  Philip laughed. He was exhilarated by the scene, the
funny little man in his odd clothes, the panelled room and the
Spanish furniture, the English fare: the whole thing had an
exquisite incongruity.

  "You laugh, my boy, you can't imagine marrying
beneath you. You want a wife who's an intellectual equal. Your head
is crammed full of ideas of comradeship. Stuff and nonsense, my
boy! A man doesn't want to talk politics to his wife, and what do
you think I care for Betty's views upon the Differential Calculus?
A man wants a wife who can cook his dinner and look after his
children. I've tried both and I know. Let's have the pudding
in."

  He clapped his hands and presently Sally came. When
she took away the plates, Philip wanted to get up and help her, but
Athelny stopped him.

  "Let her alone, my boy. She doesn't want you to fuss
about, do you, Sally? And she won't think it rude of you to sit
still while she waits upon you. She don't care a damn for chivalry,
do you, Sally?"

  "No, father," answered Sally demurely.

  "Do you know what I'm talking about, Sally?"

  "No, father. But you know mother doesn't like you to
swear."

  Athelny laughed boisterously. Sally brought them
plates of rice pudding, rich, creamy, and luscious. Athelny
attacked his with gusto.

  "One of the rules of this house is that Sunday
dinner should never alter. It is a ritual. Roast beef and rice
pudding for fifty Sundays in the year. On Easter Sunday lamb and
green peas, and at Michaelmas roast goose and apple sauce. Thus we
preserve the traditions of our people. When Sally marries she will
forget many of the wise things I have taught her, but she will
never forget that if you want to be good and happy you must eat on
Sundays roast beef and rice pudding."

  "You'll call when you're ready for cheese," said
Sally impassively.

  "D'you know the legend of the halcyon?" said
Athelny: Philip was growing used to his rapid leaping from one
subject to another. "When the kingfisher, flying over the sea, is
exhausted, his mate places herself beneath him and bears him along
upon her stronger wings. That is what a man wants in a wife, the
halcyon. I lived with my first wife for three years. She was a
lady, she had fifteen hundred a year, and we used to give nice
little dinner parties in our little red brick house in Kensington.
She was a charming woman; they all said so, the barristers and
their wives who dined with us, and the literary stockbrokers, and
the budding politicians; oh, she was a charming woman. She made me
go to church in a silk hat and a frock coat, she took me to
classical concerts, and she was very fond of lectures on Sunday
afternoon; and she sat down to breakfast every morning at
eight-thirty, and if I was late breakfast was cold; and she read
the right books, admired the right pictures, and adored the right
music. My God, how that woman bored me! She is charming still, and
she lives in the little red brick house in Kensington, with Morris
papers and Whistler's etchings on the walls, and gives the same
nice little dinner parties, with veal creams and ices from
Gunter's, as she did twenty years ago."

  Philip did not ask by what means the ill-matched
couple had separated, but Athelny told him.

  "Betty's not my wife, you know; my wife wouldn't
divorce me. The children are bastards, every jack one of them, and
are they any the worse for that? Betty was one of the maids in the
little red brick house in Kensington. Four or five years ago I was
on my uppers, and I had seven children, and I went to my wife and
asked her to help me. She said she'd make me an allowance if I'd
give Betty up and go abroad. Can you see me giving Betty up? We
starved for a while instead. My wife said I loved the gutter. I've
degenerated; I've come down in the world; I earn three pounds a
week as press agent to a linendraper, and every day I thank God
that I'm not in the little red brick house in Kensington."

  Sally brought in Cheddar cheese, and Athelny went on
with his fluent conversation.

  "It's the greatest mistake in the world to think
that one needs money to bring up a family. You need money to make
them gentlemen and ladies, but I don't want my children to be
ladies and gentlemen. Sally's going to earn her living in another
year. She's to be apprenticed to a dressmaker, aren't you, Sally?
And the boys are going to serve their country. I want them all to
go into the Navy; it's a jolly life and a healthy life, good food,
good pay, and a pension to end their days on."

  Philip lit his pipe. Athelny smoked cigarettes of
Havana tobacco, which he rolled himself. Sally cleared away. Philip
was reserved, and it embarrassed him to be the recipient of so many
confidences. Athelny, with his powerful voice in the diminutive
body, with his bombast, with his foreign look, with his emphasis,
was an astonishing creature. He reminded Philip a good deal of
Cronshaw. He appeared to have the same independence of thought, the
same bohemianism, but he had an infinitely more vivacious
temperament; his mind was coarser, and he had not that interest in
the abstract which made Cronshaw's conversation so captivating.
Athelny was very proud of the county family to which he belonged;
he showed Philip photographs of an Elizabethan mansion, and told
him:

  "The Athelnys have lived there for seven centuries,
my boy. Ah, if you saw the chimney-pieces and the ceilings!"

  There was a cupboard in the wainscoting and from
this he took a family tree. He showed it to Philip with child-like
satisfaction. It was indeed imposing.

  "You see how the family names recur, Thorpe,
Athelstan, Harold, Edward; I've used the family names for my sons.
And the girls, you see, I've given Spanish names to."

  An uneasy feeling came to Philip that possibly the
whole story was an elaborate imposture, not told with any base
motive, but merely from a wish to impress, startle, and amaze.
Athelny had told him that he was at Winchester; but Philip,
sensitive to differences of manner, did not feel that his host had
the characteristics of a man educated at a great public school.
While he pointed out the great alliances which his ancestors had
formed, Philip amused himself by wondering whether Athelny was not
the son of some tradesman in Winchester, auctioneer or
coal-merchant, and whether a similarity of surname was not his only
connection with the ancient family whose tree he was
displaying.

  There was a knock at the door and a troop of
children came in. They were clean and tidy, now. their faces shone
with soap, and their hair was plastered down; they were going to
Sunday school under Sally's charge. Athelny joked with them in his
dramatic, exuberant fashion, and you could see that he was devoted
to them all. His pride in their good health and their good looks
was touching. Philip felt that they were a little shy in his
presence, and when their father sent them off they fled from the
room in evident relief. In a few minutes Mrs. Athelny appeared. She
had taken her hair out of the curling pins and now wore an
elaborate fringe. She had on a plain black dress, a hat with cheap
flowers, and was forcing her hands, red and coarse from much work,
into black kid gloves.

  "I'm going to church, Athelny," she said. "There's
nothing you'll be wanting, is there?"

  "Only your prayers, my Betty."

  "They won't do you much good, you're too far gone
for that," she smiled. Then, turning to Philip, she drawled: "I
can't get him to go to church. He's no better than an atheist."

  "Doesn't she look like Rubens' second wife?" cried
Athelny. "Wouldn't she look splendid in a seventeenth-century
costume? That's the sort of wife to marry, my boy. Look at
her."

  "I believe you'd talk the hind leg off a donkey,
Athelny," she answered calmly.

  She succeeded in buttoning her gloves, but before
she went she turned to Philip with a kindly, slightly embarrassed
smile.

  "You'll stay to tea, won't you? Athelny likes
someone to talk to, and it's not often he gets anybody who's clever
enough."

  "Of course he'll stay to tea," said Athelny. Then
when his wife had gone: "I make a point of the children going to
Sunday school, and I like Betty to go to church. I think women
ought to be religious. I don't believe myself, but I like women and
children to."

  Philip, strait-laced in matters of truth, was a
little shocked by this airy attitude.

  "But how can you look on while your children are
being taught things which you don't think are true?"

  "If they're beautiful I don't much mind if they're
not true. It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to
your reason as well as to your sense of the aesthetic. I wanted
Betty to become a Roman Catholic, I should have liked to see her
converted in a crown of paper flowers, but she's hopelessly
Protestant. Besides, religion is a matter of temperament; you will
believe anything if you have the religious turn of mind, and if you
haven't it doesn't matter what beliefs were instilled into you, you
will grow out of them. Perhaps religion is the best school of
morality. It is like one of those drugs you gentlemen use in
medicine which carries another in solution: it is of no efficacy in
itself, but enables the other to be absorbed. You take your
morality because it is combined with religion; you lose the
religion and the morality stays behind. A man is more likely to be
a good man if he has learned goodness through the love of God than
through a perusal of Herbert Spencer."

  This was contrary to all Philip's ideas. He still
looked upon Christianity as a degrading bondage that must be cast
away at any cost; it was connected subconsciously in his mind with
the dreary services in the cathedral at Tercanbury, and the long
hours of boredom in the cold church at Blackstable; and the
morality of which Athelny spoke was to him no more than a part of
the religion which a halting intelligence preserved, when it had
laid aside the beliefs which alone made it reasonable. But while he
was meditating a reply Athelny, more interested in hearing himself
speak than in discussion, broke into a tirade upon Roman
Catholicism. For him it was an essential part of Spain; and Spain
meant much to him, because he had escaped to it from the
conventionality which during his married life he had found so
irksome. With large gestures and in the emphatic tone which made
what he said so striking, Athelny described to Philip the Spanish
cathedrals with their vast dark spaces, the massive gold of the
altar-pieces, and the sumptuous iron-work, gilt and faded, the air
laden with incense, the silence: Philip almost saw the Canons in
their short surplices of lawn, the acolytes in red, passing from
the sacristy to the choir; he almost heard the monotonous chanting
of vespers. The names which Athelny mentioned, Avila, Tarragona,
Saragossa, Segovia, Cordova, were like trumpets in his heart. He
seemed to see the great gray piles of granite set in old Spanish
towns amid a landscape tawny, wild, and windswept.

  "I've always thought I should love to go to
Seville," he said casually, when Athelny, with one hand
dramatically uplifted, paused for a moment.

  "Seville!" cried Athelny. "No, no, don't go there.
Seville: it brings to the mind girls dancing with castanets,
singing in gardens by the Guadalquivir, bull-fights,
orange-blossom, mantillas, mantones de Manila. It is the Spain of
comic opera and Montmartre. Its facile charm can offer permanent
entertainment only to an intelligence which is superficial.
Theophile Gautier got out of Seville all that it has to offer. We
who come after him can only repeat his sensations. He put large fat
hands on the obvious and there is nothing but the obvious there;
and it is all finger-marked and frayed. Murillo is its
painter."