Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham [ebook reader that looks like a book .txt] 📗

“Oh, I don’t mind. Anything’s good enough for me,” she answered.

Philip passed off her sulky reply with a laugh, and, the landlady having arranged to send for their luggage, they sat down to rest themselves. Philip’s foot was hurting him a little, and he was glad to put it up on a chair.

“I suppose you don’t mind my sitting in the same room with you,” said Mildred aggressively.

“Don’t let’s quarrel, Mildred,” he said gently.

“I didn’t know you was so well off you could afford to throw away a pound a week.”

“Don’t be angry with me. I assure you it’s the only way we can live together at all.”

“I suppose you despise me, that’s it.”

“Of course I don’t. Why should I?”

“It’s so unnatural.”

“Is it? You’re not in love with me, are you?”

“Me? Who d’you take me for?”

“It’s not as if you were a very passionate woman, you’re not that.”

“It’s so humiliating,” she said sulkily.

“Oh, I wouldn’t fuss about that if I were you.”

There were about a dozen people in the boardinghouse. They ate in a narrow, dark room at a long table, at the head of which the landlady sat and carved. The food was bad. The landlady called it French cooking, by which she meant that the poor quality of the materials was disguised by ill-made sauces: plaice masqueraded as sole and New Zealand mutton as lamb. The kitchen was small and inconvenient, so that everything was served up lukewarm. The people were dull and pretentious; old ladies with elderly maiden daughters; funny old bachelors with mincing ways; pale-faced, middle-aged clerks with wives, who talked of their married daughters and their sons who were in a very good position in the Colonies. At table they discussed Miss Corelli’s latest novel; some of them liked Lord Leighton better than Mr. Alma-Tadema, and some of them liked Mr. Alma-Tadema better than Lord Leighton. Mildred soon told the ladies of her romantic marriage with Philip; and he found himself an object of interest because his family, county people in a very good position, had cut him off with a shilling because he married while he was only a stoodent; and Mildred’s father, who had a large place down Devonshire way, wouldn’t do anything for them because she had married Philip. That was why they had come to a boardinghouse and had not a nurse for the baby; but they had to have two rooms because they were both used to a good deal of accommodation and they didn’t care to be cramped. The other visitors also had explanations of their presence: one of the single gentlemen generally went to the Metropole for his holiday, but he liked cheerful company and you couldn’t get that at one of those expensive hotels; and the old lady with the middle-aged daughter was having her beautiful house in London done up and she said to her daughter: “Gwennie, my dear, we must have a cheap holiday this year,” and so they had come there, though of course it wasn’t at all the kind of thing they were used to. Mildred found them all very superior, and she hated a lot of common, rough people. She liked gentlemen to be gentlemen in every sense of the word.

“When people are gentlemen and ladies,” she said, “I like them to be gentlemen and ladies.”

The remark seemed cryptic to Philip, but when he heard her say it two or three times to different persons, and found that it aroused hearty agreement, he came to the conclusion that it was only obscure to his own intelligence. It was the first time that Philip and Mildred had been thrown entirely together. In London he did not see her all day, and when he came home the household affairs, the baby, the neighbours, gave them something to talk about till he settled down to work. Now he spent the whole day with her. After breakfast they went down to the beach; the morning went easily enough with a bathe and a stroll along the front; the evening, which they spent on the pier, having put the baby to bed, was tolerable, for there was music to listen to and a constant stream of people to look at; (Philip amused himself by imagining who they were and weaving little stories about them; he had got into the habit of answering Mildred’s remarks with his mouth only so that his thoughts remained undisturbed;) but the afternoons were long and dreary. They sat on the beach. Mildred said they must get all the benefit they could out of Doctor Brighton, and he could not read because Mildred made observations frequently about things in general. If he paid no attention she complained.

“Oh, leave that silly old book alone. It can’t be good for you always reading. You’ll addle your brain, that’s what you’ll do, Philip.”

“Oh, rot!” he answered.

“Besides, it’s so unsociable.”

He discovered that it was difficult to talk to her. She had not even the power of attending to what she was herself saying, so that a dog running in front of her or the passing of a man in a loud blazer would call forth a remark and then she would forget what she had been speaking of. She had a bad memory for names, and it irritated her not to be able to think of them, so that she would pause in the middle of some story to rack her brains. Sometimes she had to give it up, but it often occurred to her afterwards, and when Philip was talking of something she would interrupt him.

“Collins, that was it. I knew it would come back to me some time. Collins, that’s the name I couldn’t remember.”

It exasperated him because it showed that she was not listening to anything he said, and yet, if he was silent, she reproached him for sulkiness. Her mind was of an order that could not deal for five minutes with the abstract, and when Philip gave way to