Of Human Bondage (100 page)

  But presently the influence of the place descended
upon him. He felt quieter. He began to look absently at the
tombstones with which the room was lined. They were the work of
Athenian stone masons of the fourth and fifth centuries before
Christ, and they were very simple, work of no great talent but with
the exquisite spirit of Athens upon them; time had mellowed the
marble to the colour of honey, so that unconsciously one thought of
the bees of Hymettus, and softened their outlines. Some represented
a nude figure, seated on a bench, some the departure of the dead
from those who loved him, and some the dead clasping hands with one
who remained behind. On all was the tragic word farewell; that and
nothing more. Their simplicity was infinitely touching. Friend
parted from friend, the son from his mother, and the restraint made
the survivor's grief more poignant. It was so long, long ago, and
century upon century had passed over that unhappiness; for two
thousand years those who wept had been dust as those they wept for.
Yet the woe was alive still, and it filled Philip's heart so that
he felt compassion spring up in it, and he said:

  "Poor things, poor things."

  And it came to him that the gaping sight-seers and
the fat strangers with their guide-books, and all those mean,
common people who thronged the shop, with their trivial desires and
vulgar cares, were mortal and must die. They too loved and must
part from those they loved, the son from his mother, the wife from
her husband; and perhaps it was more tragic because their lives
were ugly and sordid, and they knew nothing that gave beauty to the
world. There was one stone which was very beautiful, a bas relief
of two young men holding each other's hand; and the reticence of
line, the simplicity, made one like to think that the sculptor here
had been touched with a genuine emotion. It was an exquisite
memorial to that than which the world offers but one thing more
precious, to a friendship; and as Philip looked at it, he felt the
tears come to his eyes. He thought of Hayward and his eager
admiration for him when first they met, and how disillusion had
come and then indifference, till nothing held them together but
habit and old memories. It was one of the queer things of life that
you saw a person every day for months and were so intimate with him
that you could not imagine existence without him; then separation
came, and everything went on in the same way, and the companion who
had seemed essential proved unnecessary. Your life proceeded and
you did not even miss him. Philip thought of those early days in
Heidelberg when Hayward, capable of great things, had been full of
enthusiasm for the future, and how, little by little, achieving
nothing, he had resigned himself to failure. Now he was dead. His
death had been as futile as his life. He died ingloriously, of a
stupid disease, failing once more, even at the end, to accomplish
anything. It was just the same now as if he had never lived.

  Philip asked himself desperately what was the use of
living at all. It all seemed inane. It was the same with Cronshaw:
it was quite unimportant that he had lived; he was dead and
forgotten, his book of poems sold in remainder by second-hand
booksellers; his life seemed to have served nothing except to give
a pushing journalist occasion to write an article in a review. And
Philip cried out in his soul:

  "What is the use of it?"

  The effort was so incommensurate with the result.
The bright hopes of youth had to be paid for at such a bitter price
of disillusionment. Pain and disease and unhappiness weighed down
the scale so heavily. What did it all mean? He thought of his own
life, the high hopes with which he had entered upon it, the
limitations which his body forced upon him, his friendlessness, and
the lack of affection which had surrounded his youth. He did not
know that he had ever done anything but what seemed best to do, and
what a cropper he had come! Other men, with no more advantages than
he, succeeded, and others again, with many more, failed. It seemed
pure chance. The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust,
and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.

  Thinking of Cronshaw, Philip remembered the Persian
rug which he had given him, telling him that it offered an answer
to his question upon the meaning of life; and suddenly the answer
occurred to him: he chuckled: now that he had it, it was like one
of the puzzles which you worry over till you are shown the solution
and then cannot imagine how it could ever have escaped you. The
answer was obvious. Life had no meaning. On the earth, satellite of
a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the
influence of conditions which were part of the planet's history;
and as there had been a beginning of life upon it so, under the
influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more
significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of
creation but as a physical reaction to the environment. Philip
remembered the story of the Eastern King who, desiring to know the
history of man, was brought by a sage five hundred volumes; busy
with affairs of state, he bade him go and condense it; in twenty
years the sage returned and his history now was in no more than
fifty volumes, but the King, too old then to read so many ponderous
tomes, bade him go and shorten it once more; twenty years passed
again and the sage, old and gray, brought a single book in which
was the knowledge the King had sought; but the King lay on his
death-bed, and he had no time to read even that; and then the sage
gave him the history of man in a single line; it was this: he was
born, he suffered, and he died. There was no meaning in life, and
man by living served no end. It was immaterial whether he was born
or not born, whether he lived or ceased to live. Life was
insignificant and death without consequence. Philip exulted, as he
had exulted in his boyhood when the weight of a belief in God was
lifted from his shoulders: it seemed to him that the last burden of
responsibility was taken from him; and for the first time he was
utterly free. His insignificance was turned to power, and he felt
himself suddenly equal with the cruel fate which had seemed to
persecute him; for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed
of its cruelty. What he did or left undone did not matter. Failure
was unimportant and success amounted to nothing. He was the most
inconsiderate creature in that swarming mass of mankind which for a
brief space occupied the surface of the earth; and he was almighty
because he had wrenched from chaos the secret of its nothingness.
Thoughts came tumbling over one another in Philip's eager fancy,
and he took long breaths of joyous satisfaction. He felt inclined
to leap and sing. He had not been so happy for months.

  "Oh, life," he cried in his heart, "Oh life, where
is thy sting?"

  For the same uprush of fancy which had shown him
with all the force of mathematical demonstration that life had no
meaning, brought with it another idea; and that was why Cronshaw,
he imagined, had given him the Persian rug. As the weaver
elaborated his pattern for no end but the pleasure of his aesthetic
sense, so might a man live his life, or if one was forced to
believe that his actions were outside his choosing, so might a man
look at his life, that it made a pattern. There was as little need
to do this as there was use. It was merely something he did for his
own pleasure. Out of the manifold events of his life, his deeds,
his feelings, his thoughts, he might make a design, regular,
elaborate, complicated, or beautiful; and though it might be no
more than an illusion that he had the power of selection, though it
might be no more than a fantastic legerdemain in which appearances
were interwoven with moonbeams, that did not matter: it seemed, and
so to him it was. In the vast warp of life (a river arising from no
spring and flowing endlessly to no sea), with the background to his
fancies that there was no meaning and that nothing was important, a
man might get a personal satisfaction in selecting the various
strands that worked out the pattern. There was one pattern, the
most obvious, perfect, and beautiful, in which a man was born, grew
to manhood, married, produced children, toiled for his bread, and
died; but there were others, intricate and wonderful, in which
happiness did not enter and in which success was not attempted; and
in them might be discovered a more troubling grace. Some lives, and
Hayward's was among them, the blind indifference of chance cut off
while the design was still imperfect; and then the solace was
comfortable that it did not matter; other lives, such as
Cronshaw's, offered a pattern which was difficult to follow, the
point of view had to be shifted and old standards had to be altered
before one could understand that such a life was its own
justification. Philip thought that in throwing over the desire for
happiness he was casting aside the last of his illusions. His life
had seemed horrible when it was measured by its happiness, but now
he seemed to gather strength as he realised that it might be
measured by something else. Happiness mattered as little as pain.
They came in, both of them, as all the other details of his life
came in, to the elaboration of the design. He seemed for an instant
to stand above the accidents of his existence, and he felt that
they could not affect him again as they had done before. Whatever
happened to him now would be one more motive to add to the
complexity of the pattern, and when the end approached he would
rejoice in its completion. It would be a work of art, and it would
be none the less beautiful because he alone knew of its existence,
and with his death it would at once cease to be.

  Philip was happy.

  Mr. Sampson, the buyer, took a fancy to Philip. Mr.
Sampson was very dashing, and the girls in his department said they
would not be surprised if he married one of the rich customers. He
lived out of town and often impressed the assistants by putting on
his evening clothes in the office. Sometimes he would be seen by
those on sweeping duty coming in next morning still dressed, and
they would wink gravely to one another while he went into his
office and changed into a frock coat. On these occasions, having
slipped out for a hurried breakfast, he also would wink at Philip
as he walked up the stairs on his way back and rub his hands.

  "What a night! What a night!" he said. "My
word!"

  He told Philip that he was the only gentleman there,
and he and Philip were the only fellows who knew what life was.
Having said this, he changed his manner suddenly, called Philip Mr.
Carey instead of old boy, assumed the importance due to his
position as buyer, and put Philip back into his place of
shop-walker.

  Lynn and Sedley received fashion papers from Paris
once a week and adapted the costumes illustrated in them to the
needs of their customers. Their clientele was peculiar. The most
substantial part consisted of women from the smaller manufacturing
towns, who were too elegant to have their frocks made locally and
not sufficiently acquainted with London to discover good
dressmakers within their means. Beside these, incongruously, was a
large number of music-hall artistes. This was a connection that Mr.
Sampson had worked up for himself and took great pride in. They had
begun by getting their stage-costumes at Lynn's, and he had induced
many of them to get their other clothes there as well.

  "As good as Paquin and half the price," he said.

  He had a persuasive, hail-fellow well-met air with
him which appealed to customers of this sort, and they said to one
another:

  "What's the good of throwing money away when you can
get a coat and skirt at Lynn's that nobody knows don't come from
Paris?"

  Mr. Sampson was very proud of his friendship with
the popular favourites whose frocks he made, and when he went out
to dinner at two o'clock on Sunday with Miss Victoria Virgo – "she
was wearing that powder blue we made her and I lay she didn't let
on it come from us, I 'ad to tell her meself that if I 'adn't
designed it with my own 'ands I'd have said it must come from
Paquin" – at her beautiful house in Tulse Hill, he regaled the
department next day with abundant details. Philip had never paid
much attention to women's clothes, but in course of time he began,
a little amused at himself, to take a technical interest in them.
He had an eye for colour which was more highly trained than that of
anyone in the department, and he had kept from his student days in
Paris some knowledge of line. Mr. Sampson, an ignorant man
conscious of his incompetence, but with a shrewdness that enabled
him to combine other people's suggestions, constantly asked the
opinion of the assistants in his department in making up new
designs; and he had the quickness to see that Philip's criticisms
were valuable. But he was very jealous, and would never allow that
he took anyone's advice. When he had altered some drawing in
accordance with Philip's suggestion, he always finished up by
saying: