Mrs. Craddock - W. Somerset Maugham (top books to read txt) 📗

to grant her happiness. The passionate rebellion after her child’s death had ceased insensibly, and in her misery, in her loneliness, she had found a new faith. Belief with some comes and goes without reason: with them it is a matter not of conviction, but rather of sensibility; and Bertha found prayer easier in Catholic churches than in the cheerless meeting-houses she had been used to. She could not utter stated words at stated hours in a meaningless chorus; the crowd caused her to shut away her emotions, and her heart could expand only in solitude. In Paris she had found quiet chapels, open at all hours, to which she could go for rest when the sun without was over-dazzling; and in the evening, the dimness, the fragrance of old incense, and the silence, were very restful. Then the only light came from the tapers, burning in gratitude or in hope, throwing a fitful, mysterious glimmer; and Bertha prayed earnestly for Edward and for herself.

 

But Edward would not let himself be loved, and her efforts all were useless. Her love was a jewel that he valued not at all, that he flung aside and cared not if he lost. But she was too unhappy, too broken in spirit, to be angry. What was the use of anger? She knew that Edward would see nothing extraordinary in what he had done. He would return, confident, well-pleased with himself after a good night’s rest, and entirely unaware that she had been grievously hurt.

“I suppose the injustice is on my side. I am too exacting. I can’t help it.”

She only knew one way to love, and that, it appeared was a foolish way. “Oh, I wish I could go away again now—for ever.”

She got up and ate a solitary breakfast, busying herself afterwards in the house. Edward had left word that he would be in to luncheon, and was it not his pride to keep his word? But all her impatience had gone; Bertha felt now no particular anxiety to see him. She was on the point of going out—the air was warm and balmy—but did not, in case Edward should return and be disappointed at her absence.

“What a fool I am to think of his feelings! If I’m not in, he’ll just go about his work and think nothing more of me till I appear.”

But, notwithstanding, she stayed. He arrived at last, and she did not hurry to meet him; she was putting things away in her bedroom, and continued though she heard his voice below. The difference was curious between her intense and almost painful expectation of the previous day and this present unconcern. She turned as he came in, but did not move towards him.

“So you’ve come back? Did you enjoy yourself?”

“Yes, rather. But I say, it’s ripping to have you home. You weren’t in a wax at my not being here?”

“Oh no,” she said, smiling. “I didn’t mind at all.”

“That’s all right. Of course I’d never been to Lord Philip’s before, and I couldn’t wire the last minute to say that my wife was coming home and I had to meet her.”

“Of course not; it would have made you appear too absurd.”

“But I was jolly sick, I can tell you. If you’d only let me know a week ago that you were coming, I should have refused the invitation.”

“My dear Edward, I’m so unpractical, I never know my own mind, and I’m always doing things on the spur of the moment, to my own inconvenience and other people’s. And I should never have expected you to deny yourself anything for my sake.”

Bertha, perplexed, almost dismayed, looked at her husband with astonishment. She scarcely recognised him. In the three years of their common life Bertha had noticed no change in him, and with her great faculty for idealisation, had carried in her mind always his image, as he appeared when first she saw him, the slender, manly youth of eight-and-twenty. Miss Ley had discerned alterations, and spiteful feminine tongues had said that he was going off dreadfully. But his wife had seen nothing. And the separation had given further opportunities to her fantasy. In absence she had thought of him as the handsomest of men, delighting over his clear features, his fair hair, his inexhaustible youth and strength. The plain facts would have disappointed her even if Edward had retained the looks of his youth, but seeing now as well the other changes, the shock was extreme. It was a different man she saw, almost a stranger. Craddock did not wear well; though but thirty-one, he looked much older. He had broadened and put on flesh, his features had lost their delicacy, and the red of his cheeks was growing coarse. He wore his clothes in a slovenly fashion, and had fallen into a lumbering walk as if his boots were always heavy with clay; and there was in him, besides, the heartiness and intolerant joviality of the prosperous farmer. Edward’s good looks had given Bertha the keenest pleasure, and now, rushing, as was her habit, to the other extreme, she found him almost ugly. This was an exaggeration, for though he was no longer the slim youth of her first acquaintance, he was still, in a heavy, massive way, better looking than the majority of men.

Edward kissed her with marital calm, and the propinquity wafted to Bertha’s nostrils the strong scents of the farmyard, which, no matter what his clothes, hung perpetually about him. She turned away, hardly concealing a little shiver of disgust. Yet they were the same masculine odours as once had made her nearly faint with desire.

Chapter XXIV

BERTHA’S imagination seldom permitted her to see things in anything but a false light; sometimes they were pranked out in the glamour of the ideal, while at others the process was quite reversed. It was astonishing that so short a break should have destroyed the habit of three years; but the fact was plain that Edward had become a stranger, so that she felt it irksome to share the same room with him. She saw him now with jaundiced eyes, and told herself that at last she had discovered his true colours. Poor Edward was paying heavily because the furtive years had robbed him of his locks and given him in exchange a superabundance of fat; because responsibility, the east wind, and good living, had taken the edge off his features and turned his cheeks plethoric.

Bertha’s love, indeed, had finally disappeared as suddenly as it had arisen, and she began seriously to loathe her husband. She had acquired a certain part of Miss Ley’s analytic faculty, which now she employed with destructive effect upon Edward’s character. Her absence had increased the danger to Edward in another way, for the air of Paris had exhilarated her and sharpened her wits so that her alertness to find fault was doubled and her impatience with the commonplace and the stupid, extreme. And Bertha soon found that her husband’s mind was not only commonplace, but common. His ignorance no longer seemed touching, but merely shameful; his prejudices no longer amusing but contemptible. She was indignant at having humbled herself so abjectly before a man of such narrowness of mind, of such insignificant character. She could not conceive how she had ever passionately loved him. He was bound in by the stupidest routine. It irritated her beyond measure to see the regularity with which he went through the varying processes of his toilet. She was indignant with his presumption, and self-satisfaction, and conscious rectitude. Edward’s taste was contemptible in books, in pictures, and in music; and his pretentions to judge upon such matters filled Bertha with scorn. At first his deficiencies had not affected her, and later she consoled herself with the obvious truism that a man may be ignorant of all the arts, and yet have every virtue under the sun. But now she was less charitable. Bertha wondered that because her husband could read and write as well as most board-scholars, he should feel himself competent to judge books—even without reading them. Of course it was most unreasonable to blame the poor man for a foible common to the vast majority of mankind. Every one who can hold a pen is confident of his ability to criticise, and to criticise superciliously. It never occurs to the average citizen that, to speak modestly, almost as much art is needed to write a book as to adulterate a pound of tea; nor that the author has busied himself with style and contrast, characterisation, light and shade, and many other things to which the practice of haberdashery, greengrocery, company-promotion, or pork-butchery, is no great key.

One day, Edward, coming in, caught sight of the yellow paper-cover of a French book that Bertha was reading.

“What, at it again?” said he. “You read too much; it’s not good for people to be always reading.”

“Is that your opinion?”

“My idea is that a woman oughtn’t to stuff her head with books. You’d be much better out in the open air or doing something useful.”

“Is that your opinion?”

“Well, I should like to know why you’re always reading?”

“Sometimes to instruct myself; always to amuse myself.”

“Much instruction you’ll get out of an indecent French novel.”

Bertha without answering handed him the book and showed the title; they were the letters of Madame de Sévigné.

“Well?” he said.

“You’re no wiser, dear Edward?” she asked, with a smile: such a question in such a tone, revenged her for much. “You’re none the wiser? I’m afraid you’re very ignorant. You see I’m not reading a novel, and it is not indecent. They are the letters of a mother to her daughter, models of epistolary style and feminine wisdom.”

Bertha purposely spoke in rather formal and elaborate a manner.

“Oh,” said Edward, somewhat mystified; feeling that he had been confounded, but certain, none the less, that he was in the right. Bertha smiled provokingly.

“Of course,” he said, “I’ve got no objection to your reading if it amuses you.”

“It’s very good of you to say so.”

“I don’t pretend to have any book-learning; I’m a practical man, and it’s not required. In my business you find that the man who reads books, comes a mucker!”

“You seem to think that ignorance is creditable.”

“It’s better to have a good and pure heart, Bertha, and a clean mind, than any amount of learning.”

“It’s better to have a grain of wit than a collection of moral saws.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that, but I’m quite content to be as I am, and I don’t want to know a single foreign language. English is quite good enough for me.”

“So long as you’re a good sportsman and wash yourself regularly, you think you’ve performed the whole duty of man.”

“If there’s one chap I can’t stick, it’s a measly bookworm.”

“I prefer him to the hybrid of a professional cricketer and a Turkish-bath man.”

“Does that mean me?”

“You can take it to yourself if you like,” said Bertha, smiling, “or apply it to a whole class.... Do you mind if I go on reading?”

Bertha took up her book; but Edward was the more argumentatively inclined since he saw he had not so far got the better of the contest.

“Well, what I must say is, if you want to read, why can’t you read English books? Surely there are enough. I think English people ought to stick to their own country. I don’t pretend to have read any French books, but I’ve never heard anybody deny, that at all events the great majority are indecent, and not the sort of thing a woman should read.”

“It’s always incautious to judge from common report,” answered Bertha, without looking up.

“And now that the French are always behaving so badly to us, I should like to see every French book in the kingdom put into a huge bonfire. I’m sure it would be all the better for we English people. What we want now is