Of Human Bondage. Уильям Сомерсет Моэм

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ I don’t see why you shouldn’t talk.”

      “You bore me,” said Philip.

      “Please yourself.”

      Rose shrugged his shoulders and left him. Philip was very white, as he always became when he was moved, and his heart beat violently. When Rose went away he felt suddenly sick with misery. He did not know why he had answered in that fashion. He would have given anything to be friends with Rose. He hated to have quarrelled with him, and now that he saw he had given him pain he was very sorry. But at the moment he had not been master of himself. It seemed that some devil had seized him, forcing him to say bitter things against his will, even though at the time he wanted to shake hands with Rose and meet him more than halfway. The desire to wound had been too strong for him. He had wanted to revenge himself for the pain and the humiliation he had endured. It was pride: it was folly too, for he knew that Rose would not care at all, while he would suffer bitterly. The thought came to him that he would go to Rose, and say:

      “I say, I’m sorry I was such a beast. I couldn’t help it. Let’s make it up.”

      But he knew he would never be able to do it. He was afraid that Rose would sneer at him. He was angry with himself, and when Sharp came in a little while afterwards he seized upon the first opportunity to quarrel with him. Philip had a fiendish instinct for discovering other people’s raw spots, and was able to say things that rankled because they were true. But Sharp had the last word.

      “I heard Rose talking about you to Mellor just now,” he said. “Mellor said: Why didn’t you kick him? It would teach him manners. And Rose said: I didn’t like to. Damned cripple.”

      Philip suddenly became scarlet. He could not answer, for there was a lump in his throat that almost choked him.

      XX

      Philip was moved into the Sixth, but he hated school now with all his heart, and, having lost his ambition, cared nothing whether he did ill or well. He awoke in the morning with a sinking heart because he must go through another day of drudgery. He was tired of having to do things because he was told; and the restrictions irked him, not because they were unreasonable, but because they were restrictions. He yearned for freedom. He was weary of repeating things that he knew already and of the hammering away, for the sake of a thick-witted fellow, at something that he understood from the beginning.

      With Mr. Perkins you could work or not as you chose. He was at once eager and abstracted. The Sixth Form room was in a part of the old abbey which had been restored, and it had a gothic window: Philip tried to cheat his boredom by drawing this over and over again; and sometimes out of his head he drew the great tower of the Cathedral or the gateway that led into the precincts. He had a knack for drawing. Aunt Louisa during her youth had painted in water colours, and she had several albums filled with sketches of churches, old bridges, and picturesque cottages. They were often shown at the vicarage tea-parties. She had once given Philip a paint-box as a Christmas present, and he had started by copying her pictures. He copied them better than anyone could have expected, and presently he did little pictures of his own. Mrs. Carey encouraged him. It was a good way to keep him out of mischief, and later on his sketches would be useful for bazaars. Two or three of them had been framed and hung in his bed-room.

      But one day, at the end of the morning’s work, Mr. Perkins stopped him as he was lounging out of the form-room.

      “I want to speak to you, Carey.”

      Philip waited. Mr. Perkins ran his lean fingers through his beard and looked at Philip. He seemed to be thinking over what he wanted to say.

      “What’s the matter with you, Carey?” he said abruptly.

      Philip, flushing, looked at him quickly. But knowing him well by now, without answering, he waited for him to go on.

      “I’ve been dissatisfied with you lately. You’ve been slack and inattentive. You seem to take no interest in your work. It’s been slovenly and bad.”

      “I’m very sorry, sir,” said Philip.

      “Is that all you have to say for yourself?”

      Philip looked down sulkily. How could he answer that he was bored to death?

      “You know, this term you’ll go down instead of up. I shan’t give you a very good report.”

      Philip wondered what he would say if he knew how the report was treated. It arrived at breakfast, Mr. Carey glanced at it indifferently, and passed it over to Philip.

      “There’s your report. You’d better see what it says,” he remarked, as he ran his fingers through the wrapper of a catalogue of second-hand books.

      Philip read it.

      “Is it good?” asked Aunt Louisa.

      “Not so good as I deserve,” answered Philip, with a smile, giving it to her.

      “I’ll read it afterwards when I’ve got my spectacles,” she said.

      But after breakfast Mary Ann came in to say the butcher was there, and she generally forgot.

      Mr. Perkins went on.

      “I’m disappointed with you. And I can’t understand. I know you can do things if you want to, but you don’t seem to want to any more. I was going to make you a monitor next term, but I think I’d better wait a bit.”

      Philip flushed. He did not like the thought of being passed over. He tightened his lips.

      “And there’s something else. You must begin thinking of your scholarship now. You won’t get anything unless you start working very seriously.”

      Philip was irritated by the lecture. He was angry with the headmaster, and angry with himself.

      “I don’t think I’m going up to Oxford,” he said.

      “Why not? I thought your idea was to be ordained.”

      “I’ve changed my mind.”

      “Why?”

      Philip did not answer. Mr. Perkins, holding himself oddly as he always did, like a figure in one of Perugino’s pictures, drew his fingers thoughtfully through his beard. He looked at Philip as though he were trying to understand and then abruptly told him he might go.

      Apparently he was not satisfied, for one evening, a week later, when Philip had to go into his study with some papers, he resumed the conversation; but this time he adopted a different method: he spoke to Philip not as a schoolmaster with a boy but as one human being with another. He did not seem to care now that Philip’s work was poor, that he ran small chance against keen rivals of carrying off the scholarship necessary for him to go to Oxford: the important matter was his changed intention about his life afterwards. Mr. Perkins set himself to revive his eagerness to be ordained. With infinite skill he worked on his feelings, and this was easier since he was himself genuinely moved. Philip’s change of mind caused him bitter distress, and he really thought he was throwing away his chance of happiness in life for he knew not what. His voice was very persuasive. And Philip, easily moved by the emotion of others, very emotional himself notwithstanding a placid exterior–his face, partly by nature but also from the habit of all these years at school, seldom except by his quick flushing showed what СКАЧАТЬ