The Hero. W. Somerset Maugham
were eminently worthy people, who thought light-heartedness somewhat indecent. They did endless good in the most disagreeable manner possible; and in their fervour not only bore unnecessary crosses themselves, but saddled them on to everyone else, as the only certain passport to the Golden City.
The Reverend Archibald Jackson had been appointed to the living of Little Primpton while James was in India, and consequently had never seen him.
"I was telling your father," said Mrs. Jackson, on shaking hands, "that I hoped you were properly grateful for all the mercies that have been bestowed upon you."
James stared at her a little. "Were you?"
He hated the fashion these people had of discussing matters which he himself thought most private.
"Mr. Jackson was asking if you'd like a short prayer offered up next Sunday, James," said his mother.
"I shouldn't at all."
"Why not?" asked the Vicar, "I think it's your duty to thank your Maker for your safe return, and I think your parents should join in the thanksgiving."
"We're probably none of us less grateful," said James, "because we don't want to express our feelings before the united congregation."
Jamie's parents looked at him with relief, for the same thought filled their minds; but thinking it their duty to submit themselves to the spiritual direction of the Vicar and his wife, they had not thought it quite right to decline the proposal. Mrs. Jackson glanced at her husband with pained astonishment, but further argument was prevented by the arrival of Colonel and Mrs. Clibborn, and Mary.
Colonel Clibborn was a tall man, with oily black hair and fierce eyebrows, both dyed; aggressively military and reminiscent He had been in a cavalry regiment, where he had come to the philosophic conclusion that all men are dust—except cavalry-men; and he was able to look upon Jamie's prowess—the prowess of an infantryman—from superior heights. He was a great authority upon war, and could tell anyone what were the mistakes in South Africa, and how they might have been avoided; likewise he had known in the service half the peers of the realm, and talked of them by their Christian names. He spent three weeks every season in London, and dined late, at seven o'clock, so he had every qualification for considering himself a man of fashion.
"I don't know what they'd do in Little Primpton without us," he said. "It's only us who keep it alive."
But Mrs. Clibborn missed society.
"The only people I can speak to are the Parsons," she told her husband, plaintively. "They're very good people—but only infantry, Reggie."
"Of course, they're only infantry," agreed Colonel Clibborn.
Mrs. Clibborn was a regimental beauty—of fifty, who had grown stout; but not for that ceased to use the weapons which Nature had given her against the natural enemies of the sex. In her dealings with several generations of adorers, she had acquired such a habit of languishing glances that now she used them unconsciously. Whether ordering meat from the butcher or discussing parochial matters with Mr. Jackson, Mrs. Clibborn's tone and manner were such that she might have been saying the most tender things. She had been very popular in the service, because she was the type of philandering woman who required no beating about the bush; her neighbour at the dinner-table, even if he had not seen her before, need never have hesitated to tell her with the soup that she was the handsomest creature he had ever seen, and with the entrée that he adored her.
On coming in, Mrs. Clibborn for a moment looked at James, quite speechless, her head on one side and her eyes screwing into the corner of the room.
"Oh, how wonderful!" she said, at last "I suppose I mustn't call you Jamie now." She spoke very slowly, and every word sounded like a caress. Then she looked at James again in silent ecstasy. "Colonel Parsons, how proud you must be! And when I think that soon he will be my son! How thin you look, James!"
"And how well you look, dear lady!"
It was understood that everyone must make compliments to Mrs. Clibborn; otherwise she grew cross, and when she was cross she was horrid.
She smiled to show her really beautiful teeth.
"I should like to kiss you, James. May I, Mrs. Parsons?"
"Certainly," replied Jamie's mother, who didn't approve of Mrs. Clibborn at all.
She turned her cheek to James, and assumed a seraphic expression while he lightly touched it with his lips.
"I'm only an old woman," she murmured to the company in general.
She seldom made more than one remark at a time, and at the end of each assumed an appropriate attitude—coy, Madonna-like, resigned, as the circumstances might require. Mr. Jackson came forward to shake hands, and she turned her languishing glance on him.
"Oh, Mr. Jackson, how beautiful your sermon was!"
They sat down to dinner, and ate their ox-tail soup. It is terrible to think of the subtlety with which the Evil One can insinuate himself among the most pious; for soup at middle-day is one of his most dangerous wiles, and it is precisely with the simple-minded inhabitants of the country and of the suburbs that this vice is most prevalent.
James was sitting next to Mrs. Clibborn, and presently she looked at him with the melancholy smile which had always seemed to her so effective.
"We want you to tell us how you won your Victoria Cross, Jamie."
The others, eager to hear the story from the hero's lips, had been, notwithstanding, too tactful to ask; but they were willing to take advantage of Mrs. Clibborn's lack of that quality.
"We've all been looking forward to it," said the Vicar.
"I don't think there's anything to tell," replied James.
His father and mother were looking at him with happy eyes, and the Colonel nodded to Mary.
"Please, Jamie, tell us," she said. "We only saw the shortest account in the papers, and you said nothing about it in your letters."
"D'you think it's very good form of me to tell you about it?" asked James, smiling gravely.
"We're all friends here," said the Vicar.
And Colonel Clibborn added, making sheep's eyes at his wife:
"You can't refuse a lady!"
"I'm an old woman," sighed Mrs. Clibborn, with a doleful glance. "I can't expect him to do it for me."
The only clever thing Mrs. Clibborn had done in her life was to acknowledge to old age at thirty, and then she did not mean it. It had been one of her methods in flirtation, covering all excesses under a maternal aspect. She must have told hundreds of young officers that she was old enough to be their mother; and she always said it looking plaintively at the ceiling, when they squeezed her hand.
"It wasn't a very wonderful thing I did," said James, at last, "and it was completely useless."
"No fine deed is useless," said the Vicar, sententiously.
James looked at him a moment, but proceeded with his story.
"It was only that I tried to save the life of a sub who'd just joined—and didn't."
"Would you pass me the salt?" said Mrs. Clibborn.
"Mamma!" cried Mary, with a look as near irritation as her gentle nature permitted.
"Go on, Jamie, there's a good boy," said Mrs. Parsons.
And James, seeing his father's charming, pathetic look of pride, told the story to him alone. The others did not care how much they hurt him so long as they could gape in admiration, but in his father he saw the most touching sympathy.
"It was a chap called Larcher, a boy of eighteen, with fair hair and blue eyes, who looked quite absurdly young. His people live somewhere round here, near Ashford."
"Larcher, did you say?" asked Mrs. Clibborn,