Of Human Bondage
Worms. Here and there a more piercing glitter was the Rhine. The
tremendous spaciousness of it was glowing with rich gold. Philip, as he
stood there, his heart beating with sheer joy, thought how the tempter
had stood with Jesus on a high mountain and shown him the kingdoms of
the earth. To Philip, intoxicated with the beauty of the scene, it
seemed that it was the whole world which was spread before him, and he
was eager to step down and enjoy it. He was free from degrading fears
and free from prejudice. He could go his way without the intolerable
dread of hell-fire. Suddenly he realised that he had lost also that
burden of responsibility which made every action of his life a matter
of urgent consequence. He could breathe more freely in a lighter air.
He was responsible only to himself for the things he did. Freedom! He
was his own master at last. From old habit, unconsciously he thanked
God that he no longer believed in Him.
Drunk with pride in his intelligence and in his fearlessness, Philip
entered deliberately upon a new life. But his loss of faith made less
difference in his behaviour than he expected. Though he had thrown on
one side the Christian dogmas it never occurred to him to criticise the
Christian ethics; he accepted the Christian virtues, and indeed thought
it fine to practise them for their own sake, without a thought of
reward or punishment. There was small occasion for heroism in the Frau
Professor’s house, but he was a little more exactly truthful than he
had been, and he forced himself to be more than commonly attentive to
the dull, elderly ladies who sometimes engaged him in conversation. The
gentle oath, the violent adjective, which are typical of our language
and which he had cultivated before as a sign of manliness, he now
elaborately eschewed.
Having settled the whole matter to his satisfaction he sought to put it
out of his mind, but that was more easily said than done; and he could
not prevent the regrets nor stifle the misgivings which sometimes
tormented him. He was so young and had so few friends that immortality
had no particular attractions for him, and he was able without trouble
to give up belief in it; but there was one thing which made him
wretched; he told himself that he was unreasonable, he tried to laugh
himself out of such pathos; but the tears really came to his eyes when
he thought that he would never see again the beautiful mother whose
love for him had grown more precious as the years since her death
passed on. And sometimes, as though the influence of innumerable
ancestors, Godfearing and devout, were working in him unconsciously,
there seized him a panic fear that perhaps after all it was all true,
and there was, up there behind the blue sky, a jealous God who would
punish in everlasting flames the atheist. At these times his reason
could offer him no help, he imagined the anguish of a physical torment
which would last endlessly, he felt quite sick with fear and burst into
a violent sweat. At last he would say to himself desperately:
“After all, it’s not my fault. I can’t force myself to believe. If
there is a God after all and he punishes me because I honestly don’t
believe in Him I can’t help it.”
XXIX
Winter set in. Weeks went to Berlin to attend the lectures of Paulssen,
and Hayward began to think of going South. The local theatre opened its
doors. Philip and Hayward went to it two or three times a week with the
praiseworthy intention of improving their German, and Philip found it a
more diverting manner of perfecting himself in the language than
listening to sermons. They found themselves in the midst of a revival
of the drama. Several of Ibsen’s plays were on the repertory for the
winter; Sudermann’s Die Ehre was then a new play, and on its production
in the quiet university town caused the greatest excitement; it was
extravagantly praised and bitterly attacked; other dramatists followed
with plays written under the modern influence, and Philip witnessed a
series of works in which the vileness of mankind was displayed before
him. He had never been to a play in his life till then (poor touring
companies sometimes came to the Assembly Rooms at Blackstable, but the
Vicar, partly on account of his profession, partly because he thought
it would be vulgar, never went to see them) and the passion of the
stage seized him. He felt a thrill the moment he got into the little,
shabby, ill-lit theatre. Soon he came to know the peculiarities of the
small company, and by the casting could tell at once what were the
characteristics of the persons in the drama; but this made no
difference to him. To him it was real life. It was a strange life, dark
and tortured, in which men and women showed to remorseless eyes the
evil that was in their hearts: a fair face concealed a depraved mind;
the virtuous used virtue as a mask to hide their secret vice, the
seeming-strong fainted within with their weakness; the honest were
corrupt, the chaste were lewd. You seemed to dwell in a room where the
night before an orgy had taken place: the windows had not been opened
in the morning; the air was foul with the dregs of beer, and stale
smoke, and flaring gas. There was no laughter. At most you sniggered at
the hypocrite or the fool: the characters expressed themselves in cruel
words that seemed wrung out of their hearts by shame and anguish.
Philip was carried away by the sordid intensity of it. He seemed to see
the world again in another fashion, and this world too he was anxious
to know. After the play was over he went to a tavern and sat in the
bright warmth with Hayward to eat a sandwich and drink a glass of beer.
All round were little groups of students, talking and laughing; and
here and there was a family, father and mother, a couple of sons and a
girl; and sometimes the girl said a sharp thing, and the father leaned
back in his chair and laughed, laughed heartily. It was very friendly
and innocent. There was a pleasant homeliness in the scene, but for
this Philip had no eyes. His thoughts ran on the play he had just come
from.
“You do feel it’s life, don’t you?” he said excitedly. “You know, I
don’t think I can stay here much longer. I want to get to London so
that I can really begin. I want to have experiences. I’m so tired of
preparing for life: I want to live it now.”
Sometimes Hayward left Philip to go home by himself. He would never
exactly reply to Philip’s eager questioning, but with a merry, rather
stupid laugh, hinted at a romantic amour; he quoted a few lines of
Rossetti, and once showed Philip a sonnet in which passion and purple,
pessimism and pathos, were packed together on the subject of a young
lady called Trude. Hayward surrounded his sordid and vulgar little
adventures with a glow of poetry, and thought he touched hands with
Pericles and Pheidias because to describe the object of his attentions
he used the word hetaira instead of one of those, more blunt and apt,
provided by the English language. Philip in the daytime had been led by
curiosity to pass through the little street near the old bridge, with
its neat white houses and green shutters, in which according to Hayward
the Fraulein Trude lived; but the women, with brutal faces and painted
cheeks, who came out of their doors and cried out to him, filled him
with fear; and he fled in horror from the rough hands that sought to
detain him. He yearned above all things for experience and felt himself
ridiculous because at his age he had not enjoyed that which all fiction
taught him was the most important thing in life; but he had the
unfortunate gift of seeing things as they were, and the reality which
was offered him differed too terribly from the ideal of his dreams.
He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be
crossed before the traveller through life comes to an acceptance of
reality. It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those
who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are
full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and
each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and
wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the
books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the
conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a
rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must
discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been
told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven
into the body on the cross of life. The strange thing is that each one
who has gone through that bitter disillusionment adds to it in his
turn, unconsciously, by the power within him which is stronger than
himself. The companionship of Hayward was the worst possible thing for
Philip. He was a man who saw nothing for himself, but only through a
literary atmosphere, and he was dangerous because he had deceived
himself into sincerity. He honestly mistook his sensuality for romantic
emotion, his vacillation for the artistic temperament, and his idleness
for philosophic calm. His mind, vulgar in its effort at refinement, saw
everything a little larger than life size, with the outlines blurred,
in a golden mist of sentimentality. He lied and never knew that he
lied, and when it was pointed out to him said that lies were beautiful.
He was an idealist.
XXX
Philip was restless and dissatisfied. Hayward’s poetic allusions
troubled his imagination, and his soul yearned for romance. At least
that was how he put it to himself.
And it happened that an incident was taking place in Frau Erlin’s house
which increased Philip’s preoccupation with the matter of sex. Two or
three times on his walks among the hills he had met Fraulein Cacilie
wandering by herself. He had passed her with a bow, and a few yards
further on had seen the Chinaman. He thought nothing of it; but one
evening on his way home, when night had already fallen, he passed two
people walking very close together. Hearing his footstep, they
separated quickly, and though he could not see well in the darkness he
was almost certain they were Cacilie and Herr Sung. Their rapid
movement apart suggested that they had been walking arm in arm. Philip
was puzzled and surprised. He had never paid much attention to Fraulein
Cacilie. She was a plain girl, with a square face and blunt features.
She could not have been more than sixteen, since she still wore her
long fair hair in a plait. That evening at supper he looked at her
curiously; and, though of late she had talked little at meals, she
addressed him.
“Where did you go for your walk today, Herr Carey?” she asked.
“Oh, I walked up towards the Konigstuhl.”
“I didn’t go out,” she volunteered. “I had a headache.”
The Chinaman, who sat next to her, turned round.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I hope it’s better now.”
Fraulein Cacilie was evidently uneasy, for she spoke again to Philip.
“Did you meet many people on the way?”
Philip could not help reddening when he told a downright lie.
“No. I don’t think I saw a living soul.”
He fancied that a look of relief passed across her eyes.
Soon, however, there could be no doubt that there was something between
the pair, and other people in the Frau Professor’s house saw them
lurking in dark places. The elderly ladies who sat at the head of the
table began to discuss what was now a scandal. The Frau Professor was
angry and harassed. She had done her best to see nothing. The winter
was at hand, and it was not as easy a matter then as in the summer to
keep her house full. Herr Sung was a good customer: he had two rooms on
the ground floor, and he drank a bottle of Moselle at each meal. The
Frau Professor charged him three marks a bottle and made a good profit.