Of Human Bondage (13 page)

  Then they fell into the hands of Tar. His name was
Turner; he was the most vivacious of the old masters, a short man
with an immense belly, a black beard turning now to gray, and a
swarthy skin. In his clerical dress there was indeed something in
him to suggest the tar-barrel; and though on principle he gave five
hundred lines to any boy on whose lips he overheard his nickname,
at dinner-parties in the precincts he often made little jokes about
it. He was the most worldly of the masters; he dined out more
frequently than any of the others, and the society he kept was not
so exclusively clerical. The boys looked upon him as rather a dog.
He left off his clerical attire during the holidays and had been
seen in Switzerland in gay tweeds. He liked a bottle of wine and a
good dinner, and having once been seen at the Cafe Royal with a
lady who was very probably a near relation, was thenceforward
supposed by generations of schoolboys to indulge in orgies the
circumstantial details of which pointed to an unbounded belief in
human depravity.

  Mr. Turner reckoned that it took him a term to lick
boys into shape after they had been in the Upper Third; and now and
then he let fall a sly hint, which showed that he knew perfectly
what went on in his colleague's form. He took it good-humouredly.
He looked upon boys as young ruffians who were more apt to be
truthful if it was quite certain a lie would be found out, whose
sense of honour was peculiar to themselves and did not apply to
dealings with masters, and who were least likely to be troublesome
when they learned that it did not pay. He was proud of his form and
as eager at fifty-five that it should do better in examinations
than any of the others as he had been when he first came to the
school. He had the choler of the obese, easily roused and as easily
calmed, and his boys soon discovered that there was much kindliness
beneath the invective with which he constantly assailed them. He
had no patience with fools, but was willing to take much trouble
with boys whom he suspected of concealing intelligence behind their
wilfulness. He was fond of inviting them to tea; and, though vowing
they never got a look in with him at the cakes and muffins, for it
was the fashion to believe that his corpulence pointed to a
voracious appetite, and his voracious appetite to tapeworms, they
accepted his invitations with real pleasure.

  Philip was now more comfortable, for space was so
limited that there were only studies for boys in the upper school,
and till then he had lived in the great hall in which they all ate
and in which the lower forms did preparation in a promiscuity which
was vaguely distasteful to him. Now and then it made him restless
to be with people and he wanted urgently to be alone. He set out
for solitary walks into the country. There was a little stream,
with pollards on both sides of it, that ran through green fields,
and it made him happy, he knew not why, to wander along its banks.
When he was tired he lay face-downward on the grass and watched the
eager scurrying of minnows and of tadpoles. It gave him a peculiar
satisfaction to saunter round the precincts. On the green in the
middle they practised at nets in the summer, but during the rest of
the year it was quiet: boys used to wander round sometimes arm in
arm, or a studious fellow with abstracted gaze walked slowly,
repeating to himself something he had to learn by heart. There was
a colony of rooks in the great elms, and they filled the air with
melancholy cries. Along one side lay the Cathedral with its great
central tower, and Philip, who knew as yet nothing of beauty, felt
when he looked at it a troubling delight which he could not
understand. When he had a study (it was a little square room
looking on a slum, and four boys shared it), he bought a photograph
of that view of the Cathedral, and pinned it up over his desk. And
he found himself taking a new interest in what he saw from the
window of the Fourth Form room. It looked on to old lawns,
carefully tended, and fine trees with foliage dense and rich. It
gave him an odd feeling in his heart, and he did not know if it was
pain or pleasure. It was the first dawn of the aesthetic emotion.
It accompanied other changes. His voice broke. It was no longer
quite under his control, and queer sounds issued from his
throat.

  Then he began to go to the classes which were held
in the headmaster's study, immediately after tea, to prepare boys
for confirmation. Philip's piety had not stood the test of time,
and he had long since given up his nightly reading of the Bible;
but now, under the influence of Mr. Perkins, with this new
condition of the body which made him so restless, his old feelings
revived, and he reproached himself bitterly for his backsliding.
The fires of Hell burned fiercely before his mind's eye. If he had
died during that time when he was little better than an infidel he
would have been lost; he believed implicitly in pain everlasting,
he believed in it much more than in eternal happiness; and he
shuddered at the dangers he had run.

  Since the day on which Mr. Perkins had spoken kindly
to him, when he was smarting under the particular form of abuse
which he could least bear, Philip had conceived for his headmaster
a dog-like adoration. He racked his brains vainly for some way to
please him. He treasured the smallest word of commendation which by
chance fell from his lips. And when he came to the quiet little
meetings in his house he was prepared to surrender himself
entirely. He kept his eyes fixed on Mr. Perkins' shining eyes, and
sat with mouth half open, his head a little thrown forward so as to
miss no word. The ordinariness of the surroundings made the matters
they dealt with extraordinarily moving. And often the master,
seized himself by the wonder of his subject, would push back the
book in front of him, and with his hands clasped together over his
heart, as though to still the beating, would talk of the mysteries
of their religion. Sometimes Philip did not understand, but he did
not want to understand, he felt vaguely that it was enough to feel.
It seemed to him then that the headmaster, with his black,
straggling hair and his pale face, was like those prophets of
Israel who feared not to take kings to task; and when he thought of
the Redeemer he saw Him only with the same dark eyes and those wan
cheeks.

  Mr. Perkins took this part of his work with great
seriousness. There was never here any of that flashing humour which
made the other masters suspect him of flippancy. Finding time for
everything in his busy day, he was able at certain intervals to
take separately for a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes the boys
whom he was preparing for confirmation. He wanted to make them feel
that this was the first consciously serious step in their lives; he
tried to grope into the depths of their souls; he wanted to instil
in them his own vehement devotion. In Philip, notwithstanding his
shyness, he felt the possibility of a passion equal to his own. The
boy's temperament seemed to him essentially religious. One day he
broke off suddenly from the subject on which he had been
talking.

  "Have you thought at all what you're going to be
when you grow up?" he asked.

  "My uncle wants me to be ordained," said Philip.

  "And you?"

  Philip looked away. He was ashamed to answer that he
felt himself unworthy.

  "I don't know any life that's so full of happiness
as ours. I wish I could make you feel what a wonderful privilege it
is. One can serve God in every walk, but we stand nearer to Him. I
don't want to influence you, but if you made up your mind – oh, at
once – you couldn't help feeling that joy and relief which never
desert one again."

  Philip did not answer, but the headmaster read in
his eyes that he realised already something of what he tried to
indicate.

  "If you go on as you are now you'll find yourself
head of the school one of these days, and you ought to be pretty
safe for a scholarship when you leave. Have you got anything of
your own?"

  "My uncle says I shall have a hundred a year when
I'm twenty-one."

  "You'll be rich. I had nothing."

  The headmaster hesitated a moment, and then, idly
drawing lines with a pencil on the blotting paper in front of him,
went on.

  "I'm afraid your choice of professions will be
rather limited. You naturally couldn't go in for anything that
required physical activity."

  Philip reddened to the roots of his hair, as he
always did when any reference was made to his club-foot. Mr.
Perkins looked at him gravely.

  "I wonder if you're not oversensitive about your
misfortune. Has it ever struck you to thank God for it?"

  Philip looked up quickly. His lips tightened. He
remembered how for months, trusting in what they told him, he had
implored God to heal him as He had healed the Leper and made the
Blind to see.

  "As long as you accept it rebelliously it can only
cause you shame. But if you looked upon it as a cross that was
given you to bear only because your shoulders were strong enough to
bear it, a sign of God's favour, then it would be a source of
happiness to you instead of misery."

  He saw that the boy hated to discuss the matter and
he let him go.

  But Philip thought over all that the headmaster had
said, and presently, his mind taken up entirely with the ceremony
that was before him, a mystical rapture seized him. His spirit
seemed to free itself from the bonds of the flesh and he seemed to
be living a new life. He aspired to perfection with all the passion
that was in him. He wanted to surrender himself entirely to the
service of God, and he made up his mind definitely that he would be
ordained. When the great day arrived, his soul deeply moved by all
the preparation, by the books he had studied and above all by the
overwhelming influence of the head, he could hardly contain himself
for fear and joy. One thought had tormented him. He knew that he
would have to walk alone through the chancel, and he dreaded
showing his limp thus obviously, not only to the whole school, who
were attending the service, but also to the strangers, people from
the city or parents who had come to see their sons confirmed. But
when the time came he felt suddenly that he could accept the
humiliation joyfully; and as he limped up the chancel, very small
and insignificant beneath the lofty vaulting of the Cathedral, he
offered consciously his deformity as a sacrifice to the God who
loved him.

  But Philip could not live long in the rarefied air
of the hilltops. What had happened to him when first he was seized
by the religious emotion happened to him now. Because he felt so
keenly the beauty of faith, because the desire for self-sacrifice
burned in his heart with such a gem-like glow, his strength seemed
inadequate to his ambition. He was tired out by the violence of his
passion. His soul was filled on a sudden with a singular aridity.
He began to forget the presence of God which had seemed so
surrounding; and his religious exercises, still very punctually
performed, grew merely formal. At first he blamed himself for this
falling away, and the fear of hell-fire urged him to renewed
vehemence; but the passion was dead, and gradually other interests
distracted his thoughts.

  Philip had few friends. His habit of reading
isolated him: it became such a need that after being in company for
some time he grew tired and restless; he was vain of the wider
knowledge he had acquired from the perusal of so many books, his
mind was alert, and he had not the skill to hide his contempt for
his companions' stupidity. They complained that he was conceited;
and, since he excelled only in matters which to them were
unimportant, they asked satirically what he had to be conceited
about. He was developing a sense of humour, and found that he had a
knack of saying bitter things, which caught people on the raw; he
said them because they amused him, hardly realising how much they
hurt, and was much offended when he found that his victims regarded
him with active dislike. The humiliations he suffered when first he
went to school had caused in him a shrinking from his fellows which
he could never entirely overcome; he remained shy and silent. But
though he did everything to alienate the sympathy of other boys he
longed with all his heart for the popularity which to some was so
easily accorded. These from his distance he admired extravagantly;
and though he was inclined to be more sarcastic with them than with
others, though he made little jokes at their expense, he would have
given anything to change places with them. Indeed he would gladly
have changed places with the dullest boy in the school who was
whole of limb. He took to a singular habit. He would imagine that
he was some boy whom he had a particular fancy for; he would throw
his soul, as it were, into the other's body, talk with his voice
and laugh with his heart; he would imagine himself doing all the
things the other did. It was so vivid that he seemed for a moment
really to be no longer himself. In this way he enjoyed many
intervals of fantastic happiness.