Of Human Bondage (23 page)

  Drunk with pride in his intelligence and in his
fearlessness, Philip entered deliberately upon a new life. But his
loss of faith made less difference in his behaviour than he
expected. Though he had thrown on one side the Christian dogmas it
never occurred to him to criticise the Christian ethics; he
accepted the Christian virtues, and indeed thought it fine to
practise them for their own sake, without a thought of reward or
punishment. There was small occasion for heroism in the Frau
Professor's house, but he was a little more exactly truthful than
he had been, and he forced himself to be more than commonly
attentive to the dull, elderly ladies who sometimes engaged him in
conversation. The gentle oath, the violent adjective, which are
typical of our language and which he had cultivated before as a
sign of manliness, he now elaborately eschewed.

  Having settled the whole matter to his satisfaction
he sought to put it out of his mind, but that was more easily said
than done; and he could not prevent the regrets nor stifle the
misgivings which sometimes tormented him. He was so young and had
so few friends that immortality had no particular attractions for
him, and he was able without trouble to give up belief in it; but
there was one thing which made him wretched; he told himself that
he was unreasonable, he tried to laugh himself out of such pathos;
but the tears really came to his eyes when he thought that he would
never see again the beautiful mother whose love for him had grown
more precious as the years since her death passed on. And
sometimes, as though the influence of innumerable ancestors,
Godfearing and devout, were working in him unconsciously, there
seized him a panic fear that perhaps after all it was all true, and
there was, up there behind the blue sky, a jealous God who would
punish in everlasting flames the atheist. At these times his reason
could offer him no help, he imagined the anguish of a physical
torment which would last endlessly, he felt quite sick with fear
and burst into a violent sweat. At last he would say to himself
desperately:

  "After all, it's not my fault. I can't force myself
to believe. If there is a God after all and he punishes me because
I honestly don't believe in Him I can't help it."

  Winter set in. Weeks went to Berlin to attend the
lectures of Paulssen, and Hayward began to think of going South.
The local theatre opened its doors. Philip and Hayward went to it
two or three times a week with the praiseworthy intention of
improving their German, and Philip found it a more diverting manner
of perfecting himself in the language than listening to sermons.
They found themselves in the midst of a revival of the drama.
Several of Ibsen's plays were on the repertory for the winter;
Sudermann's Die Ehre was then a new play, and on its production in
the quiet university town caused the greatest excitement; it was
extravagantly praised and bitterly attacked; other dramatists
followed with plays written under the modern influence, and Philip
witnessed a series of works in which the vileness of mankind was
displayed before him. He had never been to a play in his life till
then (poor touring companies sometimes came to the Assembly Rooms
at Blackstable, but the Vicar, partly on account of his profession,
partly because he thought it would be vulgar, never went to see
them) and the passion of the stage seized him. He felt a thrill the
moment he got into the little, shabby, ill-lit theatre. Soon he
came to know the peculiarities of the small company, and by the
casting could tell at once what were the characteristics of the
persons in the drama; but this made no difference to him. To him it
was real life. It was a strange life, dark and tortured, in which
men and women showed to remorseless eyes the evil that was in their
hearts: a fair face concealed a depraved mind; the virtuous used
virtue as a mask to hide their secret vice, the seeming-strong
fainted within with their weakness; the honest were corrupt, the
chaste were lewd. You seemed to dwell in a room where the night
before an orgy had taken place: the windows had not been opened in
the morning; the air was foul with the dregs of beer, and stale
smoke, and flaring gas. There was no laughter. At most you
sniggered at the hypocrite or the fool: the characters expressed
themselves in cruel words that seemed wrung out of their hearts by
shame and anguish.

  Philip was carried away by the sordid intensity of
it. He seemed to see the world again in another fashion, and this
world too he was anxious to know. After the play was over he went
to a tavern and sat in the bright warmth with Hayward to eat a
sandwich and drink a glass of beer. All round were little groups of
students, talking and laughing; and here and there was a family,
father and mother, a couple of sons and a girl; and sometimes the
girl said a sharp thing, and the father leaned back in his chair
and laughed, laughed heartily. It was very friendly and innocent.
There was a pleasant homeliness in the scene, but for this Philip
had no eyes. His thoughts ran on the play he had just come
from.

  "You do feel it's life, don't you?" he said
excitedly. "You know, I don't think I can stay here much longer. I
want to get to London so that I can really begin. I want to have
experiences. I'm so tired of preparing for life: I want to live it
now."

  Sometimes Hayward left Philip to go home by himself.
He would never exactly reply to Philip's eager questioning, but
with a merry, rather stupid laugh, hinted at a romantic amour; he
quoted a few lines of Rossetti, and once showed Philip a sonnet in
which passion and purple, pessimism and pathos, were packed
together on the subject of a young lady called Trude. Hayward
surrounded his sordid and vulgar little adventures with a glow of
poetry, and thought he touched hands with Pericles and Pheidias
because to describe the object of his attentions he used the word
hetaira instead of one of those, more blunt and apt, provided by
the English language. Philip in the daytime had been led by
curiosity to pass through the little street near the old bridge,
with its neat white houses and green shutters, in which according
to Hayward the Fraulein Trude lived; but the women, with brutal
faces and painted cheeks, who came out of their doors and cried out
to him, filled him with fear; and he fled in horror from the rough
hands that sought to detain him. He yearned above all things for
experience and felt himself ridiculous because at his age he had
not enjoyed that which all fiction taught him was the most
important thing in life; but he had the unfortunate gift of seeing
things as they were, and the reality which was offered him differed
too terribly from the ideal of his dreams.

  He did not know how wide a country, arid and
precipitous, must be crossed before the traveller through life
comes to an acceptance of reality. It is an illusion that youth is
happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know
they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which
have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact
with the real they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they
were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the
necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who
look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness,
prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves
that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies,
lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on
the cross of life. The strange thing is that each one who has gone
through that bitter disillusionment adds to it in his turn,
unconsciously, by the power within him which is stronger than
himself. The companionship of Hayward was the worst possible thing
for Philip. He was a man who saw nothing for himself, but only
through a literary atmosphere, and he was dangerous because he had
deceived himself into sincerity. He honestly mistook his sensuality
for romantic emotion, his vacillation for the artistic temperament,
and his idleness for philosophic calm. His mind, vulgar in its
effort at refinement, saw everything a little larger than life
size, with the outlines blurred, in a golden mist of
sentimentality. He lied and never knew that he lied, and when it
was pointed out to him said that lies were beautiful. He was an
idealist.

  Philip was restless and dissatisfied. Hayward's
poetic allusions troubled his imagination, and his soul yearned for
romance. At least that was how he put it to himself.

  And it happened that an incident was taking place in
Frau Erlin's house which increased Philip's preoccupation with the
matter of sex. Two or three times on his walks among the hills he
had met Fraulein Cacilie wandering by herself. He had passed her
with a bow, and a few yards further on had seen the Chinaman. He
thought nothing of it; but one evening on his way home, when night
had already fallen, he passed two people walking very close
together. Hearing his footstep, they separated quickly, and though
he could not see well in the darkness he was almost certain they
were Cacilie and Herr Sung. Their rapid movement apart suggested
that they had been walking arm in arm. Philip was puzzled and
surprised. He had never paid much attention to Fraulein Cacilie.
She was a plain girl, with a square face and blunt features. She
could not have been more than sixteen, since she still wore her
long fair hair in a plait. That evening at supper he looked at her
curiously; and, though of late she had talked little at meals, she
addressed him.

  "Where did you go for your walk today, Herr Carey?"
she asked.

  "Oh, I walked up towards the Konigstuhl."

  "I didn't go out," she volunteered. "I had a
headache."

  The Chinaman, who sat next to her, turned round.

  "I'm so sorry," he said. "I hope it's better
now."

  Fraulein Cacilie was evidently uneasy, for she spoke
again to Philip.

  "Did you meet many people on the way?"