Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham [20]
“He can’t be crying because I gave him the collect to learn. It’s not more than ten lines.”
“Don’t you think I might take him some picture books to look at, William? There are some of the Holy Land. There couldn’t be anything wrong in that.”
“Very well, I don’t mind.”
Mrs. Carey went into the study. To collect books was Mr. Carey’s only passion, and he never went into Tercanbury without spending an hour or two in the second-hand shop; he always brought back four or five musty volumes. He never read them, for he had long lost the habit of reading, but he liked to turn the pages, look at the illustrations if they were illustrated, and mend the bindings. He welcomed wet days because on them he could stay at home without pangs of conscience and spend the afternoon with white of egg and a glue-pot, patching up the Russia leather of some battered quarto. He had many volumes of old travels, with steel-engravings, and Mrs. Carey quickly found two which described Palestine. She coughed elaborately at the door so that Philip should have time to compose himself; she felt that he would be humiliated if she came upon him in the midst of his tears; then she rattled the door handle. When she went in Philip was poring over the prayer-book, hiding his eyes with his hands so that she might not see he had been crying.
“Do you know the collect yet?” she said.
He did not answer for a moment, and she felt that he did not trust his voice. She was oddly embarrassed.
“I can’t learn it by heart,” he said at last, with a gasp.
“Oh, well, never mind,” she said. “You needn’t. I’ve got some picture books for you to look at. Come and sit on my lap, and we’ll look at them together.”
Philip slipped off his chair and limped over to her. He looked down so that she should not see his eyes. She put her arms round him.
“Look,” she said, “that’s the place where our Blessed Lord was born.”
She showed him an Eastern town with flat roofs and cupolas and minarets. In the foreground was a group of palm-trees, and under them were resting two Arabs and some camels. Philip passed his hand over the picture as if he wanted to feel the houses and the loose habiliments of the nomads.
“Read what it says,” he asked.
Mrs. Carey in her even voice read the opposite page. It was a romantic narrative of some Eastern traveler of the thirties, pompous maybe, but fragrant with the emotion with which the East came to the generation that followed Byron and Chateaubriand. In a moment or two Philip interrupted her.
“I want to see another picture.”
When Mary Ann came in and Mrs. Carey rose to help her lay the cloth, Philip took the book in his hands and hurried through the illustrations. It was with difficulty that his aunt induced him to put the book down for tea. He had forgotten his horrible struggle to get the collect by heart; he had forgotten his tears. Next day it was raining, and he asked for the book again. Mrs. Carey gave it him joyfully. Talking over his future with her husband she had found that both desired him to take orders, and this eagerness for the book which described places hallowed by the presence of Jesus seemed a good sign. It looked as though the boy’s mind addressed itself naturally to holy things. But in a day or two he asked for more books. Mr. Carey took him into his study, showed him the shelf in which he kept illustrated works, and chose for him one that dealt with Rome. Philip took it greedily. The pictures led him to a new amusement. He began to read the page before and the page after each engraving to find out what it was about, and soon he lost. all interest in his toys.
Then, when no one was near, he took out books for himself; and perhaps because the first impression on his mind was made by an Eastern town, he found his chief amusement in those which described the Levant. His heart beat with excitement at the pictures of mosques and rich palaces; but there was one, in a book on Constantinople, which peculiarly stirred his imagination. It was called the Hall of the Thousand Columns. It was