Of Human Bondage
laughing. He laughed too, good-humouredly, and his almond eyes almost
closed as he did so. There were two or three American men, in black
coats, rather yellow and dry of skin: they were theological students;
Philip heard the twang of their New England accent through their bad
German, and he glanced at them with suspicion; for he had been taught
to look upon Americans as wild and desperate barbarians.
Afterwards, when they had sat for a little on the stiff green velvet
chairs of the drawing-room, Fraulein Anna asked Philip if he would like
to go for a walk with them.
Philip accepted the invitation. They were quite a party. There were the
two daughters of the Frau Professor, the two other girls, one of the
American students, and Philip. Philip walked by the side of Anna and
Fraulein Hedwig. He was a little fluttered. He had never known any
girls. At Blackstable there were only the farmers’ daughters and the
girls of the local tradesmen. He knew them by name and by sight, but he
was timid, and he thought they laughed at his deformity. He accepted
willingly the difference which the Vicar and Mrs. Carey put between
their own exalted rank and that of the farmers. The doctor had two
daughters, but they were both much older than Philip and had been
married to successive assistants while Philip was still a small boy. At
school there had been two or three girls of more boldness than modesty
whom some of the boys knew; and desperate stories, due in all
probability to the masculine imagination, were told of intrigues with
them; but Philip had always concealed under a lofty contempt the terror
with which they filled him. His imagination and the books he had read
had inspired in him a desire for the Byronic attitude; and he was torn
between a morbid self-consciousness and a conviction that he owed it to
himself to be gallant. He felt now that he should be bright and
amusing, but his brain seemed empty and he could not for the life of
him think of anything to say. Fraulein Anna, the Frau Professor’s
daughter, addressed herself to him frequently from a sense of duty, but
the other said little: she looked at him now and then with sparkling
eyes, and sometimes to his confusion laughed outright. Philip felt that
she thought him perfectly ridiculous. They walked along the side of a
hill among pine-trees, and their pleasant odour caused Philip a keen
delight. The day was warm and cloudless. At last they came to an
eminence from which they saw the valley of the Rhine spread out before
them under the sun. It was a vast stretch of country, sparkling with
golden light, with cities in the distance; and through it meandered the
silver ribband of the river. Wide spaces are rare in the corner of Kent
which Philip knew, the sea offers the only broad horizon, and the
immense distance he saw now gave him a peculiar, an indescribable
thrill. He felt suddenly elated. Though he did not know it, it was the
first time that he had experienced, quite undiluted with foreign
emotions, the sense of beauty. They sat on a bench, the three of them,
for the others had gone on, and while the girls talked in rapid German,
Philip, indifferent to their proximity, feasted his eyes.
“By Jove, I am happy,” he said to himself unconsciously.
XXIII
Philip thought occasionally of the King’s School at Tercanbury, and
laughed to himself as he remembered what at some particular moment of
the day they were doing. Now and then he dreamed that he was there
still, and it gave him an extraordinary satisfaction, on awaking, to
realise that he was in his little room in the turret. From his bed he
could see the great cumulus clouds that hung in the blue sky. He
revelled in his freedom. He could go to bed when he chose and get up
when the fancy took him. There was no one to order him about. It struck
him that he need not tell any more lies.
It had been arranged that Professor Erlin should teach him Latin and
German; a Frenchman came every day to give him lessons in French; and
the Frau Professor had recommended for mathematics an Englishman who
was taking a philological degree at the university. This was a man
named Wharton. Philip went to him every morning. He lived in one room
on the top floor of a shabby house. It was dirty and untidy, and it was
filled with a pungent odour made up of many different stinks. He was
generally in bed when Philip arrived at ten o’clock, and he jumped out,
put on a filthy dressing-gown and felt slippers, and, while he gave
instruction, ate his simple breakfast. He was a short man, stout from
excessive beer drinking, with a heavy moustache and long, unkempt hair.
He had been in Germany for five years and was become very Teutonic. He
spoke with scorn of Cambridge where he had taken his degree and with
horror of the life which awaited him when, having taken his doctorate
in Heidelberg, he must return to England and a pedagogic career. He
adored the life of the German university with its happy freedom and its
jolly companionships. He was a member of a Burschenschaft, and promised
to take Philip to a Kneipe. He was very poor and made no secret that
the lessons he was giving Philip meant the difference between meat for
his dinner and bread and cheese. Sometimes after a heavy night he had
such a headache that he could not drink his coffee, and he gave his
lesson with heaviness of spirit. For these occasions he kept a few
bottles of beer under the bed, and one of these and a pipe would help
him to bear the burden of life.
“A hair of the dog that bit him,” he would say as he poured out the
beer, carefully so that the foam should not make him wait too long to
drink.
Then he would talk to Philip of the university, the quarrels between
rival corps, the duels, and the merits of this and that professor.
Philip learnt more of life from him than of mathematics. Sometimes
Wharton would sit back with a laugh and say:
“Look here, we’ve not done anything today. You needn’t pay me for the
lesson.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” said Philip.
This was something new and very interesting, and he felt that it was of
greater import than trigonometry, which he never could understand. It
was like a window on life that he had a chance of peeping through, and
he looked with a wildly beating heart.
“No, you can keep your dirty money,” said Wharton.
“But how about your dinner?” said Philip, with a smile, for he knew
exactly how his master’s finances stood.
Wharton had even asked him to pay him the two shillings which the
lesson cost once a week rather than once a month, since it made things
less complicated.
“Oh, never mind my dinner. It won’t be the first time I’ve dined off a
bottle of beer, and my mind’s never clearer than when I do.”
He dived under the bed (the sheets were gray with want of washing), and
fished out another bottle. Philip, who was young and did not know the
good things of life, refused to share it with him, so he drank alone.
“How long are you going to stay here?” asked Wharton.
Both he and Philip had given up with relief the pretence of
mathematics.
“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose about a year. Then my people want me to go
to Oxford.”
Wharton gave a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders. It was a new
experience for Philip to learn that there were persons who did not look
upon that seat of learning with awe.
“What d’you want to go there for? You’ll only be a glorified schoolboy.
Why don’t you matriculate here? A year’s no good. Spend five years
here. You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought
and freedom of action. In France you get freedom of action: you can do
what you like and nobody bothers, but you must think like everybody
else. In Germany you must do what everybody else does, but you may
think as you choose. They’re both very good things. I personally prefer
freedom of thought. But in England you get neither: you’re ground down
by convention. You can’t think as you like and you can’t act as you
like. That’s because it’s a democratic nation. I expect America’s
worse.”
He leaned back cautiously, for the chair on which he sat had a ricketty
leg, and it was disconcerting when a rhetorical flourish was
interrupted by a sudden fall to the floor.
“I ought to go back to England this year, but if I can scrape together
enough to keep body and soul on speaking terms I shall stay another
twelve months. But then I shall have to go. And I must leave all
this”—he waved his arm round the dirty garret, with its unmade bed, the
clothes lying on the floor, a row of empty beer bottles against the
wall, piles of unbound, ragged books in every corner—“for some
provincial university where I shall try and get a chair of philology.
And I shall play tennis and go to tea-parties.” He interrupted himself
and gave Philip, very neatly dressed, with a clean collar on and his
hair well-brushed, a quizzical look. “And, my God! I shall have to
wash.”
Philip reddened, feeling his own spruceness an intolerable reproach;
for of late he had begun to pay some attention to his toilet, and he
had come out from England with a pretty selection of ties.
The summer came upon the country like a conqueror. Each day was
beautiful. The sky had an arrogant blue which goaded the nerves like a
spur. The green of the trees in the Anlage was violent and crude; and
the houses, when the sun caught them, had a dazzling white which
stimulated till it hurt. Sometimes on his way back from Wharton Philip
would sit in the shade on one of the benches in the Anlage, enjoying
the coolness and watching the patterns of light which the sun, shining
through the leaves, made on the ground. His soul danced with delight as
gaily as the sunbeams. He revelled in those moments of idleness stolen
from his work. Sometimes he sauntered through the streets of the old
town. He looked with awe at the students of the corps, their cheeks
gashed and red, who swaggered about in their coloured caps. In the
afternoons he wandered about the hills with the girls in the Frau
Professor’s house, and sometimes they went up the river and had tea in
a leafy beer-garden. In the evenings they walked round and round the
Stadtgarten, listening to the band.
Philip soon learned the various interests of the household. Fraulein
Thekla, the professor’s elder daughter, was engaged to a man in England
who had spent twelve months in the house to learn German, and their
marriage was to take place at the end of the year. But the young man
wrote that his father, an india-rubber merchant who lived in Slough,
did not approve of the union, and Fraulein Thekla was often in tears.
Sometimes she and her mother might be seen, with stern eyes and
determined mouths, looking over the letters of the reluctant lover.
Thekla painted in water colour, and occasionally she and Philip, with
another of the girls to keep them company, would go out and paint
little pictures. The pretty Fraulein Hedwig had amorous troubles too.
She was the daughter of a merchant in Berlin and a dashing hussar had
fallen in love with her, a von if you please: but his parents opposed a
marriage with a person of her condition, and she had been sent to
Heidelberg to forget him. She could never, never do this, and
corresponded with him continually, and he was making every effort to
induce an exasperating father to change his mind. She told all this to
Philip with pretty sighs and becoming blushes, and showed him the
photograph of the gay lieutenant. Philip liked her best of all the
girls at the Frau Professor’s, and on their walks always tried to get
by her side. He blushed a great deal when the others chaffed him for
his obvious preference. He made the first declaration in his life to
Fraulein Hedwig, but unfortunately it was an accident, and it happened