Of Human Bondage
disagreeable remarks about Hayward he lost his temper.
“Your new friend looks like a poet,” said Weeks, with a thin smile on
his careworn, bitter mouth.
“He is a poet.”
“Did he tell you so? In America we should call him a pretty fair
specimen of a waster.”
“Well, we’re not in America,” said Philip frigidly.
“How old is he? Twenty-five? And he does nothing but stay in pensions
and write poetry.”
“You don’t know him,” said Philip hotly.
“Oh yes, I do: I’ve met a hundred and forty-seven of him.”
Weeks’ eyes twinkled, but Philip, who did not understand American
humour, pursed his lips and looked severe. Weeks to Philip seemed a man
of middle age, but he was in point of fact little more than thirty. He
had a long, thin body and the scholar’s stoop; his head was large and
ugly; he had pale scanty hair and an earthy skin; his thin mouth and
thin, long nose, and the great protuberance of his frontal bones, gave
him an uncouth look. He was cold and precise in his manner, a bloodless
man, without passion; but he had a curious vein of frivolity which
disconcerted the serious-minded among whom his instincts naturally
threw him. He was studying theology in Heidelberg, but the other
theological students of his own nationality looked upon him with
suspicion. He was very unorthodox, which frightened them; and his
freakish humour excited their disapproval.
“How can you have known a hundred and forty-seven of him?” asked Philip
seriously.
“I’ve met him in the Latin Quarter in Paris, and I’ve met him in
pensions in Berlin and Munich. He lives in small hotels in Perugia and
Assisi. He stands by the dozen before the Botticellis in Florence, and
he sits on all the benches of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. In Italy he
drinks a little too much wine, and in Germany he drinks a great deal
too much beer. He always admires the right thing whatever the right
thing is, and one of these days he’s going to write a great work. Think
of it, there are a hundred and forty-seven great works reposing in the
bosoms of a hundred and forty-seven great men, and the tragic thing is
that not one of those hundred and forty-seven great works will ever be
written. And yet the world goes on.”
Weeks spoke seriously, but his gray eyes twinkled a little at the end
of his long speech, and Philip flushed when he saw that the American
was making fun of him.
“You do talk rot,” he said crossly.
XXVII
Weeks had two little rooms at the back of Frau Erlin’s house, and one
of them, arranged as a parlour, was comfortable enough for him to
invite people to sit in. After supper, urged perhaps by the impish
humour which was the despair of his friends in Cambridge, Mass., he
often asked Philip and Hayward to come in for a chat. He received them
with elaborate courtesy and insisted on their sitting in the only two
comfortable chairs in the room. Though he did not drink himself, with a
politeness of which Philip recognised the irony, he put a couple of
bottles of beer at Hayward’s elbow, and he insisted on lighting matches
whenever in the heat of argument Hayward’s pipe went out. At the
beginning of their acquaintance Hayward, as a member of so celebrated a
university, had adopted a patronising attitude towards Weeks, who was a
graduate of Harvard; and when by chance the conversation turned upon
the Greek tragedians, a subject upon which Hayward felt he spoke with
authority, he had assumed the air that it was his part to give
information rather than to exchange ideas. Weeks had listened politely,
with smiling modesty, till Hayward finished; then he asked one or two
insidious questions, so innocent in appearance that Hayward, not seeing
into what a quandary they led him, answered blandly; Weeks made a
courteous objection, then a correction of fact, after that a quotation
from some little known Latin commentator, then a reference to a German
authority; and the fact was disclosed that he was a scholar. With
smiling ease, apologetically, Weeks tore to pieces all that Hayward had
said; with elaborate civility he displayed the superficiality of his
attainments. He mocked him with gentle irony. Philip could not help
seeing that Hayward looked a perfect fool, and Hayward had not the
sense to hold his tongue; in his irritation, his self-assurance
undaunted, he attempted to argue: he made wild statements and Weeks
amicably corrected them; he reasoned falsely and Weeks proved that he
was absurd: Weeks confessed that he had taught Greek Literature at
Harvard. Hayward gave a laugh of scorn.
“I might have known it. Of course you read Greek like a schoolmaster,”
he said. “I read it like a poet.”
“And do you find it more poetic when you don’t quite know what it
means? I thought it was only in revealed religion that a mistranslation
improved the sense.”
At last, having finished the beer, Hayward left Weeks’ room hot and
dishevelled; with an angry gesture he said to Philip:
“Of course the man’s a pedant. He has no real feeling for beauty.
Accuracy is the virtue of clerks. It’s the spirit of the Greeks that we
aim at. Weeks is like that fellow who went to hear Rubenstein and
complained that he played false notes. False notes! What did they
matter when he played divinely?”
Philip, not knowing how many incompetent people have found solace in
these false notes, was much impressed.
Hayward could never resist the opportunity which Weeks offered him of
regaining ground lost on a previous occasion, and Weeks was able with
the greatest ease to draw him into a discussion. Though he could not
help seeing how small his attainments were beside the American’s, his
British pertinacity, his wounded vanity (perhaps they are the same
thing), would not allow him to give up the struggle. Hayward seemed to
take a delight in displaying his ignorance, self-satisfaction, and
wrongheadedness. Whenever Hayward said something which was illogical,
Weeks in a few words would show the falseness of his reasoning, pause
for a moment to enjoy his triumph, and then hurry on to another subject
as though Christian charity impelled him to spare the vanquished foe.
Philip tried sometimes to put in something to help his friend, and
Weeks gently crushed him, but so kindly, differently from the way in
which he answered Hayward, that even Philip, outrageously sensitive,
could not feel hurt. Now and then, losing his calm as he felt himself
more and more foolish, Hayward became abusive, and only the American’s
smiling politeness prevented the argument from degenerating into a
quarrel. On these occasions when Hayward left Weeks’ room he muttered
angrily:
“Damned Yankee!”
That settled it. It was a perfect answer to an argument which had
seemed unanswerable.
Though they began by discussing all manner of subjects in Weeks’ little
room eventually the conversation always turned to religion: the
theological student took a professional interest in it, and Hayward
welcomed a subject in which hard facts need not disconcert him; when
feeling is the gauge you can snap your angers at logic, and when your
logic is weak that is very agreeable. Hayward found it difficult to
explain his beliefs to Philip without a great flow of words; but it was
clear (and this fell in with Philip’s idea of the natural order of
things), that he had been brought up in the church by law established.
Though he had now given up all idea of becoming a Roman Catholic, he
still looked upon that communion with sympathy. He had much to say in
its praise, and he compared favourably its gorgeous ceremonies with the
simple services of the Church of England. He gave Philip Newman’s
Apologia to read, and Philip, finding it very dull, nevertheless read
it to the end.
“Read it for its style, not for its matter,” said Hayward.
He talked enthusiastically of the music at the Oratory, and said
charming things about the connection between incense and the devotional
spirit. Weeks listened to him with his frigid smile.
“You think it proves the truth of Roman Catholicism that John Henry
Newman wrote good English and that Cardinal Manning has a picturesque
appearance?”
Hayward hinted that he had gone through much trouble with his soul. For
a year he had swum in a sea of darkness. He passed his fingers through
his fair, waving hair and told them that he would not for five hundred
pounds endure again those agonies of mind. Fortunately he had reached
calm waters at last.
“But what do you believe?” asked Philip, who was never satisfied with
vague statements.
“I believe in the Whole, the Good, and the Beautiful.”
Hayward with his loose large limbs and the fine carriage of his head
looked very handsome when he said this, and he said it with an air.
“Is that how you would describe your religion in a census paper?” asked
Weeks, in mild tones.
“I hate the rigid definition: it’s so ugly, so obvious. If you like I
will say that I believe in the church of the Duke of Wellington and Mr.
Gladstone.”
“That’s the Church of England,” said Philip.
“Oh wise young man!” retorted Hayward, with a smile which made Philip
blush, for he felt that in putting into plain words what the other had
expressed in a paraphrase, he had been guilty of vulgarity. “I belong
to the Church of England. But I love the gold and the silk which clothe
the priest of Rome, and his celibacy, and the confessional, and
purgatory: and in the darkness of an Italian cathedral, incense-laden
and mysterious, I believe with all my heart in the miracle of the Mass.
In Venice I have seen a fisherwoman come in, barefoot, throw down her
basket of fish by her side, fall on her knees, and pray to the Madonna;
and that I felt was the real faith, and I prayed and believed with her.
But I believe also in Aphrodite and Apollo and the Great God Pan.”
He had a charming voice, and he chose his words as he spoke; he uttered
them almost rhythmically. He would have gone on, but Weeks opened a
second bottle of beer.
“Let me give you something to drink.”
Hayward turned to Philip with the slightly condescending gesture which
so impressed the youth.
“Now are you satisfied?” he asked.
Philip, somewhat bewildered, confessed that he was.
“I’m disappointed that you didn’t add a little Buddhism,” said Weeks.
“And I confess I have a sort of sympathy for Mahomet; I regret that you
should have left him out in the cold.”
Hayward laughed, for he was in a good humour with himself that evening,
and the ring of his sentences still sounded pleasant in his ears. He
emptied his glass.
“I didn’t expect you to understand me,” he answered. “With your cold
American intelligence you can only adopt the critical attitude. Emerson
and all that sort of thing. But what is criticism? Criticism is purely
destructive; anyone can destroy, but not everyone can build up. You are
a pedant, my dear fellow. The important thing is to construct: I am
constructive; I am a poet.”
Weeks looked at him with eyes which seemed at the same time to be quite
grave and yet to be smiling brightly.
“I think, if you don’t mind my saying so, you’re a little drunk.”
“Nothing to speak of,” answered Hayward cheerfully. “And not enough for
me to be unable to overwhelm you in argument. But come, I have
unbosomed my soul; now tell us what your religion is.”
Weeks put his head on one side so that he looked like a sparrow on a
perch.
“I’ve been trying to find that out for years. I think I’m a Unitarian.”
“But that’s a dissenter,” said Philip.
He could not imagine why they both burst into laughter, Hayward
uproariously, and Weeks with a funny chuckle.
“And in England dissenters aren’t gentlemen, are they?” asked Weeks.
“Well, if you ask me point-blank, they’re not,” replied Philip rather
crossly.
He hated being laughed at, and they laughed again.