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.
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