Of Human Bondage
“How filthy! I thought you were a decent fellow. You were about the
only one here. She’s been with Clutton and Potter and Flanagan, even
with old Foinet—that’s why he takes so much trouble about her—and now
two of you, you and Lawson. It makes me sick.”
“Oh, what nonsense! She’s a very decent sort. One treats her just as if
she were a man.”
“Oh, don’t speak to me, don’t speak to me.”
“But what can it matter to you?” asked Philip. “It’s really no business
of yours where I spend my summer.”
“I was looking forward to it so much,” she gasped, speaking it seemed
almost to herself. “I didn’t think you had the money to go away, and
there wouldn’t have been anyone else here, and we could have worked
together, and we’d have gone to see things.” Then her thoughts flung
back to Ruth Chalice. “The filthy beast,” she cried. “She isn’t fit to
speak to.”
Philip looked at her with a sinking heart. He was not a man to think
girls were in love with him; he was too conscious of his deformity, and
he felt awkward and clumsy with women; but he did not know what else
this outburst could mean. Fanny Price, in the dirty brown dress, with
her hair falling over her face, sloppy, untidy, stood before him; and
tears of anger rolled down her cheeks. She was repellent. Philip
glanced at the door, instinctively hoping that someone would come in
and put an end to the scene.
“I’m awfully sorry,” he said.
“You’re just the same as all of them. You take all you can get, and you
don’t even say thank you. I’ve taught you everything you know. No one
else would take any trouble with you. Has Foinet ever bothered about
you? And I can tell you this—you can work here for a thousand years and
you’ll never do any good. You haven’t got any talent. You haven’t got
any originality. And it’s not only me—they all say it. You’ll never be
a painter as long as you live.”
“That is no business of yours either, is it?” said Philip, flushing.
“Oh, you think it’s only my temper. Ask Clutton, ask Lawson, ask
Chalice. Never, never, never. You haven’t got it in you.”
Philip shrugged his shoulders and walked out. She shouted after him.
“Never, never, never.”
Moret was in those days an old-fashioned town of one street at the edge
of the forest of Fontainebleau, and the Ecu d’Or was a hotel which
still had about it the decrepit air of the Ancien Regime. It faced the
winding river, the Loing; and Miss Chalice had a room with a little
terrace overlooking it, with a charming view of the old bridge and its
fortified gateway. They sat here in the evenings after dinner, drinking
coffee, smoking, and discussing art. There ran into the river, a little
way off, a narrow canal bordered by poplars, and along the banks of
this after their day’s work they often wandered. They spent all day
painting. Like most of their generation they were obsessed by the fear
of the picturesque, and they turned their backs on the obvious beauty
of the town to seek subjects which were devoid of a prettiness they
despised. Sisley and Monet had painted the canal with its poplars, and
they felt a desire to try their hands at what was so typical of France;
but they were frightened of its formal beauty, and set themselves
deliberately to avoid it. Miss Chalice, who had a clever dexterity
which impressed Lawson notwithstanding his contempt for feminine art,
started a picture in which she tried to circumvent the commonplace by
leaving out the tops of the trees; and Lawson had the brilliant idea of
putting in his foreground a large blue advertisement of chocolat Menier
in order to emphasise his abhorrence of the chocolate box.
Philip began now to paint in oils. He experienced a thrill of delight
when first he used that grateful medium. He went out with Lawson in the
morning with his little box and sat by him painting a panel; it gave
him so much satisfaction that he did not realise he was doing no more
than copy; he was so much under his friend’s influence that he saw only
with his eyes. Lawson painted very low in tone, and they both saw the
emerald of the grass like dark velvet, while the brilliance of the sky
turned in their hands to a brooding ultramarine. Through July they had
one fine day after another; it was very hot; and the heat, searing
Philip’s heart, filled him with languor; he could not work; his mind
was eager with a thousand thoughts. Often he spent the mornings by the
side of the canal in the shade of the poplars, reading a few lines and
then dreaming for half an hour. Sometimes he hired a rickety bicycle
and rode along the dusty road that led to the forest, and then lay down
in a clearing. His head was full of romantic fancies. The ladies of
Watteau, gay and insouciant, seemed to wander with their cavaliers
among the great trees, whispering to one another careless, charming
things, and yet somehow oppressed by a nameless fear.
They were alone in the hotel but for a fat Frenchwoman of middle age, a
Rabelaisian figure with a broad, obscene laugh. She spent the day by
the river patiently fishing for fish she never caught, and Philip
sometimes went down and talked to her. He found out that she had
belonged to a profession whose most notorious member for our generation
was Mrs. Warren, and having made a competence she now lived the quiet
life of the bourgeoise. She told Philip lewd stories.
“You must go to Seville,” she said—she spoke a little broken English.
“The most beautiful women in the world.”
She leered and nodded her head. Her triple chin, her large belly, shook
with inward laughter.
It grew so hot that it was almost impossible to sleep at night. The
heat seemed to linger under the trees as though it were a material
thing. They did not wish to leave the starlit night, and the three of
them would sit on the terrace of Ruth Chalice’s room, silent, hour
after hour, too tired to talk any more, but in voluptuous enjoyment of
the stillness. They listened to the murmur of the river. The church
clock struck one and two and sometimes three before they could drag
themselves to bed. Suddenly Philip became aware that Ruth Chalice and
Lawson were lovers. He divined it in the way the girl looked at the
young painter, and in his air of possession; and as Philip sat with
them he felt a kind of effluence surrounding them, as though the air
were heavy with something strange. The revelation was a shock. He had
looked upon Miss Chalice as a very good fellow and he liked to talk to
her, but it had never seemed to him possible to enter into a closer
relationship. One Sunday they had all gone with a tea-basket into the
forest, and when they came to a glade which was suitably sylvan, Miss
Chalice, because it was idyllic, insisted on taking off her shoes and
stockings. It would have been very charming only her feet were rather
large and she had on both a large corn on the third toe. Philip felt it
made her proceeding a little ridiculous. But now he looked upon her
quite differently; there was something softly feminine in her large
eyes and her olive skin; he felt himself a fool not to have seen that
she was attractive. He thought he detected in her a touch of contempt
for him, because he had not had the sense to see that she was there, in
his way, and in Lawson a suspicion of superiority. He was envious of
Lawson, and he was jealous, not of the individual concerned, but of his
love. He wished that he was standing in his shoes and feeling with his
heart. He was troubled, and the fear seized him that love would pass
him by. He wanted a passion to seize him, he wanted to be swept off his
feet and borne powerless in a mighty rush he cared not whither. Miss
Chalice and Lawson seemed to him now somehow different, and the
constant companionship with them made him restless. He was dissatisfied
with himself. Life was not giving him what he wanted, and he had an
uneasy feeling that he was losing his time.
The stout Frenchwoman soon guessed what the relations were between the
couple, and talked of the matter to Philip with the utmost frankness.
“And you,” she said, with the tolerant smile of one who had fattened on
the lust of her fellows, “have you got a petite amie?”
“No,” said Philip, blushing.
“And why not? C’est de votre age.”
He shrugged his shoulders. He had a volume of Verlaine in his hands,
and he wandered off. He tried to read, but his passion was too strong.
He thought of the stray amours to which he had been introduced by
Flanagan, the sly visits to houses in a cul-de-sac, with the
drawing-room in Utrecht velvet, and the mercenary graces of painted
women. He shuddered. He threw himself on the grass, stretching his
limbs like a young animal freshly awaked from sleep; and the rippling
water, the poplars gently tremulous in the faint breeze, the blue sky,
were almost more than he could bear. He was in love with love. In his
fancy he felt the kiss of warm lips on his, and around his neck the
touch of soft hands. He imagined himself in the arms of Ruth Chalice,
he thought of her dark eyes and the wonderful texture of her skin; he
was mad to have let such a wonderful adventure slip through his
fingers. And if Lawson had done it why should not he? But this was only
when he did not see her, when he lay awake at night or dreamed idly by
the side of the canal; when he saw her he felt suddenly quite
different; he had no desire to take her in his arms, and he could not
imagine himself kissing her. It was very curious. Away from her he
thought her beautiful, remembering only her magnificent eyes and the
creamy pallor of her face; but when he was with her he saw only that
she was flat-chested and that her teeth were slightly decayed; he could
not forget the corns on her toes. He could not understand himself.
Would he always love only in absence and be prevented from enjoying
anything when he had the chance by that deformity of vision which
seemed to exaggerate the revolting?
He was not sorry when a change in the weather, announcing the definite
end of the long summer, drove them all back to Paris.
XLVIII
When Philip returned to Amitrano’s he found that Fanny Price was no
longer working there. She had given up the key of her locker. He asked
Mrs. Otter whether she knew what had become of her; and Mrs. Otter,
with a shrug of the shoulders, answered that she had probably gone back
to England. Philip was relieved. He was profoundly bored by her
ill-temper. Moreover she insisted on advising him about his work,
looked upon it as a slight when he did not follow her precepts, and
would not understand that he felt himself no longer the duffer he had
been at first. Soon he forgot all about her. He was working in oils now
and he was full of enthusiasm. He hoped to have something done of
sufficient importance to send to the following year’s Salon. Lawson was
painting a portrait of Miss Chalice. She was very paintable, and all
the young men who had fallen victims to her charm had made portraits of
her. A natural indolence, joined with a passion for picturesque
attitude, made her an excellent sitter; and she had enough technical
knowledge to offer useful criticisms. Since her passion for art was
chiefly a passion to live the life of artists, she was quite content to
neglect her own work. She liked the warmth of the studio, and the
opportunity to smoke innumerable cigarettes; and she spoke in a low,
pleasant voice of the love of art and the art of love. She made no
clear distinction between the two.
Lawson was painting with infinite labour, working till he could hardly
stand for days and then scraping out all he had done. He would have
exhausted the patience of anyone but Ruth Chalice. At last he got into
a hopeless muddle.
“The only thing is to take a new canvas and start fresh,” he said. “I
know exactly what I want now, and it won’t take me long.”