Of Human Bondage
explaining who he was.
Boys lingered talking to one another, and presently some who had
hurried to change came out to play fives; others straggled out in twos
and threes and went out of the gateway, Philip knew they were going up
to the cricket ground; others again went into the precincts to bat at
the nets. Philip stood among them a stranger; one or two gave him an
indifferent glance; but visitors, attracted by the Norman staircase,
were not rare and excited little attention. Philip looked at them
curiously. He thought with melancholy of the distance that separated
him from them, and he thought bitterly how much he had wanted to do and
how little done. It seemed to him that all those years, vanished beyond
recall, had been utterly wasted. The boys, fresh and buoyant, were
doing the same things that he had done, it seemed that not a day had
passed since he left the school, and yet in that place where at least
by name he had known everybody now he knew not a soul. In a few years
these too, others taking their place, would stand alien as he stood;
but the reflection brought him no solace; it merely impressed upon him
the futility of human existence. Each generation repeated the trivial
round. He wondered what had become of the boys who were his companions:
they were nearly thirty now; some would be dead, but others were
married and had children; they were soldiers and parsons, doctors,
lawyers; they were staid men who were beginning to put youth behind
them. Had any of them made such a hash of life as he? He thought of the
boy he had been devoted to; it was funny, he could not recall his name;
he remembered exactly what he looked like, he had been his greatest
friend; but his name would not come back to him. He looked back with
amusement on the jealous emotions he had suffered on his account. It
was irritating not to recollect his name. He longed to be a boy again,
like those he saw sauntering through the quadrangle, so that, avoiding
his mistakes, he might start fresh and make something more out of life.
He felt an intolerable loneliness. He almost regretted the penury which
he had suffered during the last two years, since the desperate struggle
merely to keep body and soul together had deadened the pain of living.
In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy daily bread: it was not a
curse upon mankind, but the balm which reconciled it to existence.
But Philip was impatient with himself; he called to mind his idea of
the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than
part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful; he told himself
strenuously that he must accept with gaiety everything, dreariness and
excitement, pleasure and pain, because it added to the richness of the
design. He sought for beauty consciously, and he remembered how even as
a boy he had taken pleasure in the Gothic cathedral as one saw it from
the precincts; he went there and looked at the massive pile, gray under
the cloudy sky, with the central tower that rose like the praise of men
to their God; but the boys were batting at the nets, and they were
lissom and strong and active; he could not help hearing their shouts
and laughter. The cry of youth was insistent, and he saw the beautiful
thing before him only with his eyes.
CXIII
At the beginning of the last week in August Philip entered upon his
duties in the ‘district.’ They were arduous, for he had to attend on an
average three confinements a day. The patient had obtained a ‘card’
from the hospital some time before; and when her time came it was taken
to the porter by a messenger, generally a little girl, who was then
sent across the road to the house in which Philip lodged. At night the
porter, who had a latch-key, himself came over and awoke Philip. It was
mysterious then to get up in the darkness and walk through the deserted
streets of the South Side. At those hours it was generally the husband
who brought the card. If there had been a number of babies before he
took it for the most part with surly indifference, but if newly married
he was nervous and then sometimes strove to allay his anxiety by
getting drunk. Often there was a mile or more to walk, during which
Philip and the messenger discussed the conditions of labour and the
cost of living; Philip learnt about the various trades which were
practised on that side of the river. He inspired confidence in the
people among whom he was thrown, and during the long hours that he
waited in a stuffy room, the woman in labour lying on a large bed that
took up half of it, her mother and the midwife talked to him as
naturally as they talked to one another. The circumstances in which he
had lived during the last two years had taught him several things about
the life of the very poor, which it amused them to find he knew; and
they were impressed because he was not deceived by their little
subterfuges. He was kind, and he had gentle hands, and he did not lose
his temper. They were pleased because he was not above drinking a cup
of tea with them, and when the dawn came and they were still waiting
they offered him a slice of bread and dripping; he was not squeamish
and could eat most things now with a good appetite. Some of the houses
he went to, in filthy courts off a dingy street, huddled against one
another without light or air, were merely squalid; but others,
unexpectedly, though dilapidated, with worm-eaten floors and leaking
roofs, had the grand air: you found in them oak balusters exquisitely
carved, and the walls had still their panelling. These were thickly
inhabited. One family lived in each room, and in the daytime there was
the incessant noise of children playing in the court. The old walls
were the breeding-place of vermin; the air was so foul that often,
feeling sick, Philip had to light his pipe. The people who dwelt here
lived from hand to mouth. Babies were unwelcome, the man received them
with surly anger, the mother with despair; it was one more mouth to
feed, and there was little enough wherewith to feed those already
there. Philip often discerned the wish that the child might be born
dead or might die quickly. He delivered one woman of twins (a source of
humour to the facetious) and when she was told she burst into a long,
shrill wail of misery. Her mother said outright:
“I don’t know how they’re going to feed ’em.”
“Maybe the Lord’ll see fit to take ’em to ’imself,” said the midwife.
Philip caught sight of the husband’s face as he looked at the tiny pair
lying side by side, and there was a ferocious sullenness in it which
startled him. He felt in the family assembled there a hideous
resentment against those poor atoms who had come into the world
unwished for; and he had a suspicion that if he did not speak firmly an
‘accident’ would occur. Accidents occurred often; mothers ‘overlay’
their babies, and perhaps errors of diet were not always the result of
carelessness.
“I shall come every day,” he said. “I warn you that if anything happens
to them there’ll have to be an inquest.”
The father made no reply, but he gave Philip a scowl. There was murder
in his soul.
“Bless their little ’earts,” said the grandmother, “what should ’appen
to them?”
The great difficulty was to keep the mothers in bed for ten days, which
was the minimum upon which the hospital practice insisted. It was
awkward to look after the family, no one would see to the children
without payment, and the husband tumbled because his tea was not right
when he came home tired from his work and hungry. Philip had heard that
the poor helped one another, but woman after woman complained to him
that she could not get anyone in to clean up and see to the children’s
dinner without paying for the service, and she could not afford to pay.
By listening to the women as they talked and by chance remarks from
which he could deduce much that was left unsaid, Philip learned how
little there was in common between the poor and the classes above them.
They did not envy their betters, for the life was too different, and
they had an ideal of ease which made the existence of the
middle-classes seem formal and stiff; moreover, they had a certain
contempt for them because they were soft and did not work with their
hands. The proud merely wished to be left alone, but the majority
looked upon the well-to-do as people to be exploited; they knew what to
say in order to get such advantages as the charitable put at their
disposal, and they accepted benefits as a right which came to them from
the folly of their superiors and their own astuteness. They bore the
curate with contemptuous indifference, but the district visitor excited
their bitter hatred. She came in and opened your windows without so
much as a by your leave or with your leave, ’and me with my bronchitis,
enough to give me my death of cold;’ she poked her nose into corners,
and if she didn’t say the place was dirty you saw what she thought
right enough, ‘an’ it’s all very well for them as ‘as servants, but I’d
like to see what she’d make of ’er room if she ’ad four children, and
’ad to do the cookin’, and mend their clothes, and wash them.’
Philip discovered that the greatest tragedy of life to these people was
not separation or death, that was natural and the grief of it could be
assuaged with tears, but loss of work. He saw a man come home one
afternoon, three days after his wife’s confinement, and tell her he had
been dismissed; he was a builder and at that time work was slack; he
stated the fact, and sat down to his tea.
“Oh, Jim,” she said.
The man ate stolidly some mess which had been stewing in a sauce-pan
against his coming; he stared at his plate; his wife looked at him two
or three times, with little startled glances, and then quite silently
began to cry. The builder was an uncouth little fellow with a rough,
weather-beaten face and a long white scar on his forehead; he had
large, stubbly hands. Presently he pushed aside his plate as if he must
give up the effort to force himself to eat, and turned a fixed gaze out
of the window. The room was at the top of the house, at the back, and
one saw nothing but sullen clouds. The silence seemed heavy with
despair. Philip felt that there was nothing to be said, he could only
go; and as he walked away wearily, for he had been up most of the
night, his heart was filled with rage against the cruelty of the world.
He knew the hopelessness of the search for work and the desolation
which is harder to bear than hunger. He was thankful not to have to
believe in God, for then such a condition of things would be
intolerable; one could reconcile oneself to existence only because it
was meaningless.
It seemed to Philip that the people who spent their time in helping the
poorer classes erred because they sought to remedy things which would
harass them if themselves had to endure them without thinking that they
did not in the least disturb those who were used to them. The poor did
not want large airy rooms; they suffered from cold, for their food was
not nourishing and their circulation bad; space gave them a feeling of
chilliness, and they wanted to burn as little coal as need be; there
was no hardship for several to sleep in one room, they preferred it;
they were never alone for a moment, from the time they were born to the
time they died, and loneliness oppressed them; they enjoyed the
promiscuity in which they dwelt, and the constant noise of their
surroundings pressed upon their ears unnoticed. They did not feel the
need of taking a bath constantly, and Philip often heard them speak
with indignation of the necessity to do so with which they were faced
on entering the hospital: it was both an affront and a discomfort. They
wanted chiefly to be left alone; then if the man was in regular work