Of Human Bondage (60 page)

  Philip left Hayward to infer what in the passing
scene had suggested these words to him, and it was a delight to
know that he could safely leave the inference. It was in sudden
reaction from the life he had been leading for so long that he was
now deeply affected. The delicate iridescence of the London air
gave the softness of a pastel to the gray stone of the buildings;
and in the wharfs and storehouses there was the severity of grace
of a Japanese print. They went further down; and the splendid
channel, a symbol of the great empire, broadened, and it was
crowded with traffic; Philip thought of the painters and the poets
who had made all these things so beautiful, and his heart was
filled with gratitude. They came to the Pool of London, and who can
describe its majesty? The imagination thrills, and Heaven knows
what figures people still its broad stream, Doctor Johnson with
Boswell by his side, an old Pepys going on board a man-o'-war: the
pageant of English history, and romance, and high adventure. Philip
turned to Hayward with shining eyes.

  "Dear Charles Dickens," he murmured, smiling a
little at his own emotion.

  "Aren't you rather sorry you chucked painting?"
asked Hayward.

  "No."

  "I suppose you like doctoring?"

  "No, I hate it, but there was nothing else to do.
The drudgery of the first two years is awful, and unfortunately I
haven't got the scientific temperament."

  "Well, you can't go on changing professions."

  "Oh, no. I'm going to stick to this. I think I shall
like it better when I get into the wards. I have an idea that I'm
more interested in people than in anything else in the world. And
as far as I can see, it's the only profession in which you have
your freedom. You carry your knowledge in your head; with a box of
instruments and a few drugs you can make your living anywhere."

  "Aren't you going to take a practice then?"

  "Not for a good long time at any rate," Philip
answered. "As soon as I've got through my hospital appointments I
shall get a ship; I want to go to the East – the Malay Archipelago,
Siam, China, and all that sort of thing – and then I shall take odd
jobs. Something always comes along, cholera duty in India and
things like that. I want to go from place to place. I want to see
the world. The only way a poor man can do that is by going in for
the medical."

  They came to Greenwich then. The noble building of
Inigo Jones faced the river grandly.

  "I say, look, that must be the place where Poor Jack
dived into the mud for pennies," said Philip.

  They wandered in the park. Ragged children were
playing in it, and it was noisy with their cries: here and there
old seamen were basking in the sun. There was an air of a hundred
years ago.

  "It seems a pity you wasted two years in Paris,"
said Hayward.

  "Waste? Look at the movement of that child, look at
the pattern which the sun makes on the ground, shining through the
trees, look at that sky – why, I should never have seen that sky if
I hadn't been to Paris."

  Hayward thought that Philip choked a sob, and he
looked at him with astonishment.

  "What's the matter with you?"

  "Nothing. I'm sorry to be so damned emotional, but
for six months I've been starved for beauty."

  "You used to be so matter of fact. It's very
interesting to hear you say that."

  "Damn it all, I don't want to be interesting,"
laughed Philip. "Let's go and have a stodgy tea."

  Hayward's visit did Philip a great deal of good.
Each day his thoughts dwelt less on Mildred. He looked back upon
the past with disgust. He could not understand how he had submitted
to the dishonour of such a love; and when he thought of Mildred it
was with angry hatred, because she had submitted him to so much
humiliation. His imagination presented her to him now with her
defects of person and manner exaggerated, so that he shuddered at
the thought of having been connected with her.

  "It just shows how damned weak I am," he said to
himself. The adventure was like a blunder that one had committed at
a party so horrible that one felt nothing could be done to excuse
it: the only remedy was to forget. His horror at the degradation he
had suffered helped him. He was like a snake casting its skin and
he looked upon the old covering with nausea. He exulted in the
possession of himself once more; he realised how much of the
delight of the world he had lost when he was absorbed in that
madness which they called love; he had had enough of it; he did not
want to be in love any more if love was that. Philip told Hayward
something of what he had gone through.

  "Wasn't it Sophocles," he asked, "who prayed for the
time when he would be delivered from the wild beast of passion that
devoured his heart-strings?"

  Philip seemed really to be born again. He breathed
the circumambient air as though he had never breathed it before,
and he took a child's pleasure in all the facts of the world. He
called his period of insanity six months' hard labour.

  Hayward had only been settled in London a few days
when Philip received from Blackstable, where it had been sent, a
card for a private view at some picture gallery. He took Hayward,
and, on looking at the catalogue, saw that Lawson had a picture in
it.

  "I suppose he sent the card," said Philip. "Let's go
and find him, he's sure to be in front of his picture."

  This, a profile of Ruth Chalice, was tucked away in
a corner, and Lawson was not far from it. He looked a little lost,
in his large soft hat and loose, pale clothes, amongst the
fashionable throng that had gathered for the private view. He
greeted Philip with enthusiasm, and with his usual volubility told
him that he had come to live in London, Ruth Chalice was a hussy,
he had taken a studio, Paris was played out, he had a commission
for a portrait, and they'd better dine together and have a good old
talk. Philip reminded him of his acquaintance with Hayward, and was
entertained to see that Lawson was slightly awed by Hayward's
elegant clothes and grand manner. They sat upon him better than
they had done in the shabby little studio which Lawson and Philip
had shared.

  At dinner Lawson went on with his news. Flanagan had
gone back to America. Clutton had disappeared. He had come to the
conclusion that a man had no chance of doing anything so long as he
was in contact with art and artists: the only thing was to get
right away. To make the step easier he had quarrelled with all his
friends in Paris. He developed a talent for telling them home
truths, which made them bear with fortitude his declaration that he
had done with that city and was settling in Gerona, a little town
in the north of Spain which had attracted him when he saw it from
the train on his way to Barcelona. He was living there now
alone.

  "I wonder if he'll ever do any good," said
Philip.

  He was interested in the human side of that struggle
to express something which was so obscure in the man's mind that he
was become morbid and querulous. Philip felt vaguely that he was
himself in the same case, but with him it was the conduct of his
life as a whole that perplexed him. That was his means of
self-expression, and what he must do with it was not clear. But he
had no time to continue with this train of thought, for Lawson
poured out a frank recital of his affair with Ruth Chalice. She had
left him for a young student who had just come from England, and
was behaving in a scandalous fashion. Lawson really thought someone
ought to step in and save the young man. She would ruin him. Philip
gathered that Lawson's chief grievance was that the rupture had
come in the middle of a portrait he was painting.

  "Women have no real feeling for art," he said. "They
only pretend they have." But he finished philosophically enough:
"However, I got four portraits out of her, and I'm not sure if the
last I was working on would ever have been a success."

  Philip envied the easy way in which the painter
managed his love affairs. He had passed eighteen months pleasantly
enough, had got an excellent model for nothing, and had parted from
her at the end with no great pang.

  "And what about Cronshaw?" asked Philip.

  "Oh, he's done for," answered Lawson, with the
cheerful callousness of his youth. "He'll be dead in six months. He
got pneumonia last winter. He was in the English hospital for seven
weeks, and when he came out they told him his only chance was to
give up liquor."

  "Poor devil," smiled the abstemious Philip.

  "He kept off for a bit. He used to go to the Lilas
all the same, he couldn't keep away from that, but he used to drink
hot milk, avec de la fleur d'oranger, and he was damned dull."

  "I take it you did not conceal the fact from
him."

  "Oh, he knew it himself. A little while ago he
started on whiskey again. He said he was too old to turn over any
new leaves. He would rather be happy for six months and die at the
end of it than linger on for five years. And then I think he's been
awfully hard up lately. You see, he didn't earn anything while he
was ill, and the slut he lives with has been giving him a rotten
time."

  "I remember, the first time I saw him I admired him
awfully," said Philip. "I thought he was wonderful. It is sickening
that vulgar, middle-class virtue should pay."

  "Of course he was a rotter. He was bound to end in
the gutter sooner or later," said Lawson.

  Philip was hurt because Lawson would not see the
pity of it. Of course it was cause and effect, but in the necessity
with which one follows the other lay all tragedy of life.

  "Oh, I' d forgotten," said Lawson. "Just after you
left he sent round a present for you. I thought you'd be coming
back and I didn't bother about it, and then I didn't think it worth
sending on; but it'll come over to London with the rest of my
things, and you can come to my studio one day and fetch it away if
you want it."

  "You haven't told me what it is yet."

  "Oh, it's only a ragged little bit of carpet. I
shouldn't think it's worth anything. I asked him one day what the
devil he'd sent the filthy thing for. He told me he'd seen it in a
shop in the Rue de Rennes and bought it for fifteen francs. It
appears to be a Persian rug. He said you'd asked him the meaning of
life and that was the answer. But he was very drunk."

  Philip laughed.

  "Oh yes, I know. I'll take it. It was a favourite
wheeze of his. He said I must find out for myself, or else the
answer meant nothing."