Of Human Bondage
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.
CVII
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:
“Well, it comes round to my own idea in the end.”
One day, when Philip had been at the shop for five months, Miss Alice
Antonia, the well-known serio-comic, came in and asked to see Mr.
Sampson. She was a large woman, with flaxen hair, and a boldly painted
face, a metallic voice, and the breezy manner of a comedienne
accustomed to be on friendly terms with the gallery boys of provincial
music-halls. She had a new song and wished Mr. Sampson to design a
costume for her.
“I want something striking,” she said. “I don’t want any old thing you