Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham [124]
He went to her when the day’s work was over.
“Will you walk a little bit with me?” she said, looking away from him with embarrassment.
“Certainly.”
They walked for two or three minutes in silence.
“D’you remember what you said to me the other day?” she asked then on a sudden.
“Oh, I say, don’t let’s quarrel,” said Philip. “It really isn’t worth while.”
She gave a quick, painful inspiration.
“I don’t want to quarrel with you. You’re the only friend I had in Paris. I thought you rather liked me. I felt there was something between us. I was drawn towards you—you know what I mean, your club-foot.”
Philip reddened and instinctively tried to walk without a limp. He did not like anyone to mention the deformity. He knew what Fanny Price meant. She was ugly and uncouth, and because he was deformed there was between them a certain sympathy. He was very angry with her, but he forced himself not to speak.
“You said you only asked my advice to please me. Don’t you think my work’s any good?”
“I’ve only seen your drawing at Amitrano’s. It’s awfully hard to judge from that.”
“I was wondering if you’d come and look at my other work. I’ve never asked anyone else to look at it. I should like to show it to you.”
“It’s awfully kind of you. I’d like to see it very much.”
“I live quite near here,” she said apologetically. “It’ll only take you ten minutes.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he said.
They were walking along the boulevard, and she turned down a side street, then led him into another, poorer still, with cheap shops on the ground floor, and at last stopped. They climbed flight after flight of stairs. She unlocked a door, and they went into a tiny attic with a sloping roof and a small window. This was closed and the room had a musty smell. Though it was very cold there was no fire and no sign that there had been one. The bed was unmade. A chair, a chest of drawers which served also as a wash-stand, and a cheap easel, were all the furniture. The place would have been squalid enough in any case, but the litter, the untidiness, made the impression revolting. On the chimney-piece, scattered over with paints and brushes, were a cup, a dirty plate, and a tea-pot.
“If you’ll stand over there I’ll put them on the chair so that you can see them better.”
She showed him twenty small canvases, about eighteen by twelve. She placed them on the chair, one after the other, watching his face; he nodded as he looked at each one.
“You. do like them, don’t you?” she said anxiously, after a bit.
“I just want to look at them all first,” he answered. “I’ll talk afterwards.”
He was collecting himself. He was panic-stricken. He did not know what to say It was not only that they were ill-drawn, or that the color was put on amateurishly by someone who had no eye for it; but there was no attempt at getting the values, and the perspective was grotesque. It looked like the work of a child of five, but a child would have had some naïveté and might at least have made an attempt to put down what he saw; but here was the work of a vulgar mind chock-full of recollections of vulgar pictures. Philip remembered that she had talked enthusiastically about Monet and the impressionists, but here were only the worst traditions of the Royal Academy.
“There,” she said at last, “that’s the lot.”
Philip was no more truthful than anybody else, but he had a great difficulty in telling a thundering, deliberate lie, and he blushed furiously when he answered:
“I think they’re most awfully good.”
A faint color came into her unhealthy cheeks, and she smiled a little.
“You needn’t say so if you don’t think so, you know. I want the truth.”
“But I do think so.”
“Haven’t you got any criticism to offer? There must be some you don’t like as well as others.”
Philip looked round helplessly. He saw a landscape, the typical picturesque “bit” of the amateur, an old bridge, a creeper-clad cottage, and a leafy bank.
“Of course I don’t pretend to know anything about it,” he said. “But I wasn’t quite sure about the values of that.”
She flushed darkly and