Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham [325]
He held out his hand and the man, with an instinctive glance at his own to see if it was clean, shook it.
“Thank you, sir.”
Philip shook hands with him too. Chandler told the midwife to come and fetch the certificate in the morning. They left the house and walked along together in silence.
“It upsets one a bit at first, doesn’t it?” said Chandler at last.
“A bit,” answered Philip.
“If you like I’ll tell the porter not to bring you anymore calls tonight.”
“I’m off duty at eight in the morning in any case.”
“How many cases have you had?”
“Sixty-three.”
“Good. You’ll get your certificate then.”
They arrived at the hospital, and the S.O.C. went in to see if anyone wanted him. Philip walked on. It had been very hot all the day before, and even now in the early morning there was a balminess in the air. The street was very still. Philip did not feel inclined to go to bed. It was the end of his work and he need not hurry. He strolled along, glad of the fresh air and the silence; he thought that he would go on to the bridge and look at daybreak on the river. A policeman at the comer bade him good morning. He knew who Philip was from his bag.
“Out late tonight, sir,” he said.
Philip nodded and passed. He leaned against the parapet and looked toward the morning. At that hour the great city was like a city of the dead. The sky was cloudless, but the stars were dim at the approach of day; there was a light mist on the river, and the great buildings on the north side were like palaces in an enchanted island. A group of barges were moored in midstream. It was all of an unearthly violet, troubling somehow and awe-inspiring; but quickly everything grew pale, and cold, and gray. Then the sun rose, a ray of yellow gold stole across the sky, and the sky was iridescent. Philip could not get out of his eyes the dead girl lying on the bed, wan and white, and the boy who stood at the end of it like a stricken beast. The bareness of the squalid room made the pain of it more poignant. It was cruel that a stupid chance should have cut off her life when she was just entering upon it; but in the very movement of saying this to himself, Philip thought of the life which had been in store for her, the bearing of children, the dreary fight with poverty, the youth broken by toil and deprivation into a slatternly middle age—he saw the pretty face grown thin and white, the hair grow scanty, the pretty hands, worn down brutally by work, become like the claws of an old animal—then, when the man was past his prime, the difficulty of getting jobs, the small wages he had to take; and the inevitable, abject penury of the end: she might be energetic, thrifty, industrious, it would not have saved her; in the end was the workhouse or subsistence on the charity of her children. Who could pity her because she had died when life offered so little?
But pity was inane. Philip felt it was not that which these people needed. They did not pity themselves. They accepted their fate. It was the natural order of things. Otherwise, good heavens! otherwise they would swarm over the river in their multitude to the side where those great buildings were, secure and stately; and they would pillage, burn, and sack. But the day, tender and pale, had broken now, and the mist was tenuous; it bathed everything in a soft radiance; and the Thames was gray, rosy, and green; gray like mother-of-pearl and green like the heart of a yellow rose. The wharves and storehouses of the Surrey side were massed in disorderly loveliness. The scene was so exquisite that Philip’s heart beat passionately. He was overwhelmed by the beauty of the world. Beside that nothing seemed to matter.
CXV
Philip spent the few weeks that remained before the beginning of the winter session in the out-patients’ department, and in October settled down to regular work. He had been away from the hospital for so long that he found himself very largely among new people; the men of dif ferent years had little to do with one another; and his contemporaries were now mostly qualified: