Jerusalem the Golden Read Online Free PDF Page B

disclaiming a vice or a disease, ‘Well, she certainly didn’t get them from me, she must have got them from
him
, I suppose’ – a remark which Clara took years to
place, in all its ambiguity, for the truth was that Mrs Maugham had done well at school, she had shone and prospered, and the evidence of her distant triumphs still lay around the house in the form of inscribed Sunday School prizes. But whatever talents she had once had, she had now turned ferociously against them, whereas her husband did still pay a curious self-willed homage to the intellectual virtues; he possessed an 1895 edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
which he would, from time to time, read. He would also exhort his children to read it, and laid great stress upon the utility of information. His own father had been a skilled mechanic (a phrase which conveyed little to Clara) and as he himself had managed to purchase by his own labours a three-bedroomed semi-detached house in a pleasant suburban district, he might have been thought to have cause to feel fairly content with life. But he did not. He was perpetually in the grip of some obscure, niggling, unexplained bitterness, which led him to repudiate most of the overtures which Clara would from time to time make towards him; she made these attempts because she was less frightened of him than she was of her mother, and she did on one or two occasions – the purchase of a bicycle, permission to go to the cinema – manage to enlist his sympathies. But she could see that his heart was not in it. And truly, she could not blame him. She could hardly bear to think the thought, but it did seem to her that anyone who had lived for so many years with her mother could be excused for a certain lack of
joie de vivre
.
    When he died, she felt no real grief. The only reality of the event had been her mother’s reaction, which was silent, grim, and grudging to the last; not a tear did she shed, and after the funeral, as she turned away from the graveside and started to walk slowly through the cemetery mud she set her mouth in that prophetic way, and straightened her thick body, and then, as she passed a gravestone announcing that death is but a separation, she opened her mouth and said, ‘Well, he’s gone, and I can’t say I’m sorry.’ And Clara, walking by her side and hearing these words, burst suddenly and at last into loud hysterical weeping, and as the tears flooded down her hot cheeks she knew that they were not for her father, but for the meanness and the lack of love, and for the fear that she would die in so
ugly a hole, and so unloved. Nobody comforted her, for weeping was not necessary, but it was on the other hand permissible, and when she got home the aunts and uncles were kind to her and offered her cups of tea. Even her brothers were kind, though embarrassed, and Clara, as she sat there picking endlessly at the fringe of the tablecloth, had a vision of some other world where violent emotion could be a thing of beauty, where even tears could be admitted and not ignored, where good taste in tomb stones consisted not in cheap restrained economy of design, fabric, and word, but of marble angels wildly grieving. Anything, anything would make death tolerable, she thought, anything that could admit something of the grand somewhere, and not this small cramped sitting room, this domestic duplicity, this pouring of cups of tea, these harshly unaltered faces. One tear would have sufficed her, one murmur of regret, but there was nothing; the family were not even in mourning, for they found the wearing of mourning a false and hypocritical extravagance. They would admit nothing; they sat there like stones, and their one aim was to sit there like stones, so that no one could tell if they cared or did not care, so that there should be no difference between caring and not caring.
    The funeral itself had been a grotesque manifestation of Mrs Maugham’s opinions. She had refused to have her husband cremated,