Of Human Bondage (74 page)

  He would not stay in London. There everything
reminded him of his unhappiness. He telegraphed to his uncle that
he was coming to Blackstable, and, hurrying to pack, took the first
train he could. He wanted to get away from the sordid rooms in
which he had endured so much suffering. He wanted to breathe clean
air. He was disgusted with himself. He felt that he was a little
mad.

  Since he was grown up Philip had been given the best
spare room at the vicarage. It was a corner-room and in front of
one window was an old tree which blocked the view, but from the
other you saw, beyond the garden and the vicarage field, broad
meadows. Philip remembered the wall-paper from his earliest years.
On the walls were quaint water colours of the early Victorian
period by a friend of the Vicar's youth. They had a faded charm.
The dressing-table was surrounded by stiff muslin. There was an old
tall-boy to put your clothes in. Philip gave a sigh of pleasure; he
had never realised that all those things meant anything to him at
all. At the vicarage life went on as it had always done. No piece
of furniture had been moved from one place to another; the Vicar
ate the same things, said the same things, went for the same walk
every day; he had grown a little fatter, a little more silent, a
little more narrow. He had become accustomed to living without his
wife and missed her very little. He bickered still with Josiah
Graves. Philip went to see the churchwarden. He was a little
thinner, a little whiter, a little more austere; he was autocratic
still and still disapproved of candles on the altar. The shops had
still a pleasant quaintness; and Philip stood in front of that in
which things useful to seamen were sold, sea-boots and tarpaulins
and tackle, and remembered that he had felt there in his childhood
the thrill of the sea and the adventurous magic of the unknown.

  He could not help his heart beating at each double
knock of the postman in case there might be a letter from Mildred
sent on by his landlady in London; but he knew that there would be
none. Now that he could think it out more calmly he understood that
in trying to force Mildred to love him he had been attempting the
impossible. He did not know what it was that passed from a man to a
woman, from a woman to a man, and made one of them a slave: it was
convenient to call it the sexual instinct; but if it was no more
than that, he did not understand why it should occasion so vehement
an attraction to one person rather than another. It was
irresistible: the mind could not battle with it; friendship,
gratitude, interest, had no power beside it. Because he had not
attracted Mildred sexually, nothing that he did had any effect upon
her. The idea revolted him; it made human nature beastly; and he
felt suddenly that the hearts of men were full of dark places.
Because Mildred was indifferent to him he had thought her sexless;
her anaemic appearance and thin lips, the body with its narrow hips
and flat chest, the languor of her manner, carried out his
supposition; and yet she was capable of sudden passions which made
her willing to risk everything to gratify them. He had never
understood her adventure with Emil Miller: it had seemed so unlike
her, and she had never been able to explain it; but now that he had
seen her with Griffiths he knew that just the same thing had
happened then: she had been carried off her feet by an ungovernable
desire. He tried to think out what those two men had which so
strangely attracted her. They both had a vulgar facetiousness which
tickled her simple sense of humour, and a certain coarseness of
nature; but what took her perhaps was the blatant sexuality which
was their most marked characteristic. She had a genteel refinement
which shuddered at the facts of life, she looked upon the bodily
functions as indecent, she had all sorts of euphemisms for common
objects, she always chose an elaborate word as more becoming than a
simple one: the brutality of these men was like a whip on her thin
white shoulders, and she shuddered with voluptuous pain.

  One thing Philip had made up his mind about. He
would not go back to the lodgings in which he had suffered. He
wrote to his landlady and gave her notice. He wanted to have his
own things about him. He determined to take unfurnished rooms: it
would be pleasant and cheaper; and this was an urgent
consideration, for during the last year and a half he had spent
nearly seven hundred pounds. He must make up for it now by the most
rigid economy. Now and then he thought of the future with panic; he
had been a fool to spend so much money on Mildred; but he knew that
if it were to come again he would act in the same way. It amused
him sometimes to consider that his friends, because he had a face
which did not express his feelings very vividly and a rather slow
way of moving, looked upon him as strong-minded, deliberate, and
cool. They thought him reasonable and praised his common sense; but
he knew that his placid expression was no more than a mask, assumed
unconsciously, which acted like the protective colouring of
butterflies; and himself was astonished at the weakness of his
will. It seemed to him that he was swayed by every light emotion,
as though he were a leaf in the wind, and when passion seized him
he was powerless. He had no self-control. He merely seemed to
possess it because he was indifferent to many of the things which
moved other people.

  He considered with some irony the philosophy which
he had developed for himself, for it had not been of much use to
him in the conjuncture he had passed through; and he wondered
whether thought really helped a man in any of the critical affairs
of life: it seemed to him rather that he was swayed by some power
alien to and yet within himself, which urged him like that great
wind of Hell which drove Paolo and Francesca ceaselessly on. He
thought of what he was going to do and, when the time came to act,
he was powerless in the grasp of instincts, emotions, he knew not
what. He acted as though he were a machine driven by the two forces
of his environment and his personality; his reason was someone
looking on, observing the facts but powerless to interfere: it was
like those gods of Epicurus, who saw the doings of men from their
empyrean heights and had no might to alter one smallest particle of
what occurred.

  Philip went up to London a couple of days before the
session began in order to find himself rooms. He hunted about the
streets that led out of the Westminster Bridge Road, but their
dinginess was distasteful to him; and at last he found one in
Kennington which had a quiet and old-world air. It reminded one a
little of the London which Thackeray knew on that side of the
river, and in the Kennington Road, through which the great barouche
of the Newcomes must have passed as it drove the family to the West
of London, the plane-trees were bursting into leaf. The houses in
the street which Philip fixed upon were two-storied, and in most of
the windows was a notice to state that lodgings were to let. He
knocked at one which announced that the lodgings were unfurnished,
and was shown by an austere, silent woman four very small rooms, in
one of which there was a kitchen range and a sink. The rent was
nine shillings a week. Philip did not want so many rooms, but the
rent was low and he wished to settle down at once. He asked the
landlady if she could keep the place clean for him and cook his
breakfast, but she replied that she had enough work to do without
that; and he was pleased rather than otherwise because she
intimated that she wished to have nothing more to do with him than
to receive his rent. She told him that, if he inquired at the
grocer's round the corner, which was also a post office, he might
hear of a woman who would `do' for him.

  Philip had a little furniture which he had gathered
as he went along, an arm-chair that he had bought in Paris, and a
table, a few drawings, and the small Persian rug which Cronshaw had
given him. His uncle had offered a fold-up bed for which, now that
he no longer let his house in August, he had no further use; and by
spending another ten pounds Philip bought himself whatever else was
essential. He spent ten shillings on putting a corn-coloured paper
in the room he was making his parlour; and he hung on the walls a
sketch which Lawson had given him of the Quai des Grands Augustins,
and the photograph of the Odalisque by Ingres and Manet's Olympia
which in Paris had been the objects of his contemplation while he
shaved. To remind himself that he too had once been engaged in the
practice of art, he put up a charcoal drawing of the young Spaniard
Miguel Ajuria: it was the best thing he had ever done, a nude
standing with clenched hands, his feet gripping the floor with a
peculiar force, and on his face that air of determination which had
been so impressive; and though Philip after the long interval saw
very well the defects of his work its associations made him look
upon it with tolerance. He wondered what had happened to Miguel.
There is nothing so terrible as the pursuit of art by those who
have no talent. Perhaps, worn out by exposure, starvation, disease,
he had found an end in some hospital, or in an access of despair
had sought death in the turbid Seine; but perhaps with his Southern
instability he had given up the struggle of his own accord, and
now, a clerk in some office in Madrid, turned his fervent rhetoric
to politics and bull-fighting.

  Philip asked Lawson and Hayward to come and see his
new rooms, and they came, one with a bottle of whiskey, the other
with a pate de foie gras; and he was delighted when they praised
his taste. He would have invited the Scotch stockbroker too, but he
had only three chairs, and thus could entertain only a definite
number of guests. Lawson was aware that through him Philip had
become very friendly with Norah Nesbit and now remarked that he had
run across her a few days before.

  "She was asking how you were."

  Philip flushed at the mention of her name (he could
not get himself out of the awkward habit of reddening when he was
embarrassed), and Lawson looked at him quizzically. Lawson, who now
spent most of the year in London, had so far surrendered to his
environment as to wear his hair short and to dress himself in a
neat serge suit and a bowler hat.

  "I gather that all is over between you," he
said.

  "I've not seen her for months."

  "She was looking rather nice. She had a very smart
hat on with a lot of white ostrich feathers on it. She must be
doing pretty well."

  Philip changed the conversation, but he kept
thinking of her, and after an interval, when the three of them were
talking of something else, he asked suddenly:

  "Did you gather that Norah was angry with me?"

  "Not a bit. She talked very nicely of you."

  "I've got half a mind to go and see her."

  "She won't eat you."

  Philip had thought of Norah often. When Mildred left
him his first thought was of her, and he told himself bitterly that
she would never have treated him so. His impulse was to go to her;
he could depend on her pity; but he was ashamed: she had been good
to him always, and he had treated her abominably.

  "If I'd only had the sense to stick to her!" he said
to himself, afterwards, when Lawson and Hayward had gone and he was
smoking a last pipe before going to bed.

  He remembered the pleasant hours they had spent
together in the cosy sitting-room in Vincent Square, their visits
to galleries and to the play, and the charming evenings of intimate
conversation. He recollected her solicitude for his welfare and her
interest in all that concerned him. She had loved him with a love
that was kind and lasting, there was more than sensuality in it, it
was almost maternal; he had always known that it was a precious
thing for which with all his soul he should thank the gods. He made
up his mind to throw himself on her mercy. She must have suffered
horribly, but he felt she had the greatness of heart to forgive
him: she was incapable of malice. Should he write to her? No. He
would break in on her suddenly and cast himself at her feet – he
knew that when the time came he would feel too shy to perform such
a dramatic gesture, but that was how he liked to think of it – and
tell her that if she would take him back she might rely on him for
ever. He was cured of the hateful disease from which he had
suffered, he knew her worth, and now she might trust him. His
imagination leaped forward to the future. He pictured himself
rowing with her on the river on Sundays; he would take her to
Greenwich, he had never forgotten that delightful excursion with
Hayward, and the beauty of the Port of London remained a permanent
treasure in his recollection; and on the warm summer afternoons
they would sit in the Park together and talk: he laughed to himself
as he remembered her gay chatter, which poured out like a brook
bubbling over little stones, amusing, flippant, and full of
character. The agony he had suffered would pass from his mind like
a bad dream.