Of Human Bondage
On the following Sunday, when the Vicar was making his preparations to
go into the drawing-room for his nap—all the actions of his life were
conducted with ceremony—and Mrs. Carey was about to go upstairs, Philip
asked:
“What shall I do if I’m not allowed to play?”
“Can’t you sit still for once and be quiet?”
“I can’t sit still till tea-time.”
Mr. Carey looked out of the window, but it was cold and raw, and he
could not suggest that Philip should go into the garden.
“I know what you can do. You can learn by heart the collect for the
day.”
He took the prayer-book which was used for prayers from the harmonium,
and turned the pages till he came to the place he wanted.
“It’s not a long one. If you can say it without a mistake when I come
in to tea you shall have the top of my egg.”
Mrs. Carey drew up Philip’s chair to the dining-room table—they had
bought him a high chair by now—and placed the book in front of him.
“The devil finds work for idle hands to do,” said Mr. Carey.
He put some more coals on the fire so that there should be a cheerful
blaze when he came in to tea, and went into the drawing-room. He
loosened his collar, arranged the cushions, and settled himself
comfortably on the sofa. But thinking the drawing-room a little chilly,
Mrs. Carey brought him a rug from the hall; she put it over his legs
and tucked it round his feet. She drew the blinds so that the light
should not offend his eyes, and since he had closed them already went
out of the room on tiptoe. The Vicar was at peace with himself today,
and in ten minutes he was asleep. He snored softly.
It was the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, and the collect began with the
words: O God, whose blessed Son was manifested that he might destroy
the works of the devil, and make us the sons of God, and heirs of
Eternal life. Philip read it through. He could make no sense of it. He
began saying the words aloud to himself, but many of them were unknown
to him, and the construction of the sentence was strange. He could not
get more than two lines in his head. And his attention was constantly
wandering: there were fruit trees trained on the walls of the vicarage,
and a long twig beat now and then against the windowpane; sheep grazed
stolidly in the field beyond the garden. It seemed as though there were
knots inside his brain. Then panic seized him that he would not know
the words by tea-time, and he kept on whispering them to himself
quickly; he did not try to understand, but merely to get them
parrot-like into his memory.
Mrs. Carey could not sleep that afternoon, and by four o’clock she was
so wide awake that she came downstairs. She thought she would hear
Philip his collect so that he should make no mistakes when he said it
to his uncle. His uncle then would be pleased; he would see that the
boy’s heart was in the right place. But when Mrs. Carey came to the
dining-room and was about to go in, she heard a sound that made her
stop suddenly. Her heart gave a little jump. She turned away and
quietly slipped out of the front-door. She walked round the house till
she came to the dining-room window and then cautiously looked in.
Philip was still sitting on the chair she had put him in, but his head
was on the table buried in his arms, and he was sobbing desperately.
She saw the convulsive movement of his shoulders. Mrs. Carey was
frightened. A thing that had always struck her about the child was that
he seemed so collected. She had never seen him cry. And now she
realised that his calmness was some instinctive shame of showing his
feelings: he hid himself to weep.
Without thinking that her husband disliked being wakened suddenly, she
burst into the drawing-room.
“William, William,” she said. “The boy’s crying as though his heart
would break.”
Mr. Carey sat up and disentangled himself from the rug about his legs.
“What’s he got to cry about?”
“I don’t know…. Oh, William, we can’t let the boy be unhappy. D’you
think it’s our fault? If we’d had children we’d have known what to do.”
Mr. Carey looked at her in perplexity. He felt extraordinarily
helpless.
“He can’t be crying because I gave him the collect to learn. It’s not
more than ten lines.”
“Don’t you think I might take him some picture books to look at,
William? There are some of the Holy Land. There couldn’t be anything
wrong in that.”
“Very well, I don’t mind.”
Mrs. Carey went into the study. To collect books was Mr. Carey’s only
passion, and he never went into Tercanbury without spending an hour or
two in the second-hand shop; he always brought back four or five musty
volumes. He never read them, for he had long lost the habit of reading,
but he liked to turn the pages, look at the illustrations if they were
illustrated, and mend the bindings. He welcomed wet days because on
them he could stay at home without pangs of conscience and spend the
afternoon with white of egg and a glue-pot, patching up the Russia
leather of some battered quarto. He had many volumes of old travels,
with steel engravings, and Mrs. Carey quickly found two which described
Palestine. She coughed elaborately at the door so that Philip should
have time to compose himself, she felt that he would be humiliated if
she came upon him in the midst of his tears, then she rattled the door
handle. When she went in Philip was poring over the prayer-book, hiding
his eyes with his hands so that she might not see he had been crying.
“Do you know the collect yet?” she said.
He did not answer for a moment, and she felt that he did not trust his
voice. She was oddly embarrassed.
“I can’t learn it by heart,” he said at last, with a gasp.
“Oh, well, never mind,” she said. “You needn’t. I’ve got some picture
books for you to look at. Come and sit on my lap, and we’ll look at
them together.”
Philip slipped off his chair and limped over to her. He looked down so
that she should not see his eyes. She put her arms round him.
“Look,” she said, “that’s the place where our blessed Lord was born.”
She showed him an Eastern town with flat roofs and cupolas and
minarets. In the foreground was a group of palm-trees, and under them
were resting two Arabs and some camels. Philip passed his hand over the
picture as if he wanted to feel the houses and the loose habiliments of
the nomads.
“Read what it says,” he asked.
Mrs. Carey in her even voice read the opposite page. It was a romantic
narrative of some Eastern traveller of the thirties, pompous maybe, but
fragrant with the emotion with which the East came to the generation
that followed Byron and Chateaubriand. In a moment or two Philip
interrupted her.
“I want to see another picture.”
When Mary Ann came in and Mrs. Carey rose to help her lay the cloth.
Philip took the book in his hands and hurried through the
illustrations. It was with difficulty that his aunt induced him to put
the book down for tea. He had forgotten his horrible struggle to get
the collect by heart; he had forgotten his tears. Next day it was
raining, and he asked for the book again. Mrs. Carey gave it him
joyfully. Talking over his future with her husband she had found that
both desired him to take orders, and this eagerness for the book which
described places hallowed by the presence of Jesus seemed a good sign.
It looked as though the boy’s mind addressed itself naturally to holy
things. But in a day or two he asked for more books. Mr. Carey took him
into his study, showed him the shelf in which he kept illustrated
works, and chose for him one that dealt with Rome. Philip took it
greedily. The pictures led him to a new amusement. He began to read the
page before and the page after each engraving to find out what it was
about, and soon he lost all interest in his toys.
Then, when no one was near, he took out books for himself; and perhaps
because the first impression on his mind was made by an Eastern town,
he found his chief amusement in those which described the Levant. His
heart beat with excitement at the pictures of mosques and rich palaces;
but there was one, in a book on Constantinople, which peculiarly
stirred his imagination. It was called the Hall of the Thousand
Columns. It was a Byzantine cistern, which the popular fancy had
endowed with fantastic vastness; and the legend which he read told that
a boat was always moored at the entrance to tempt the unwary, but no
traveller venturing into the darkness had ever been seen again. And
Philip wondered whether the boat went on for ever through one pillared
alley after another or came at last to some strange mansion.
One day a good fortune befell him, for he hit upon Lane’s translation
of The Thousand Nights and a Night. He was captured first by the
illustrations, and then he began to read, to start with, the stories
that dealt with magic, and then the others; and those he liked he read
again and again. He could think of nothing else. He forgot the life
about him. He had to be called two or three times before he would come
to his dinner. Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the
world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing
himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know
either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would
make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.
Presently he began to read other things. His brain was precocious. His
uncle and aunt, seeing that he occupied himself and neither worried nor
made a noise, ceased to trouble themselves about him. Mr. Carey had so
many books that he did not know them, and as he read little he forgot
the odd lots he had bought at one time and another because they were
cheap. Haphazard among the sermons and homilies, the travels, the lives
of the Saints, the Fathers, the histories of the church, were
old-fashioned novels; and these Philip at last discovered. He chose
them by their titles, and the first he read was The Lancashire Witches,
and then he read The Admirable Crichton, and then many more. Whenever
he started a book with two solitary travellers riding along the brink
of a desperate ravine he knew he was safe.
The summer was come now, and the gardener, an old sailor, made him a
hammock and fixed it up for him in the branches of a weeping willow.
And here for long hours he lay, hidden from anyone who might come to
the vicarage, reading, reading passionately. Time passed and it was
July; August came: on Sundays the church was crowded with strangers,
and the collection at the offertory often amounted to two pounds.
Neither the Vicar nor Mrs. Carey went out of the garden much during
this period; for they disliked strange faces, and they looked upon the
visitors from London with aversion. The house opposite was taken for
six weeks by a gentleman who had two little boys, and he sent in to ask
if Philip would like to go and play with them; but Mrs. Carey returned
a polite refusal. She was afraid that Philip would be corrupted by
little boys from London. He was going to be a clergyman, and it was
necessary that he should be preserved from contamination. She liked to
see in him an infant Samuel.
X
The Careys made up their minds to send Philip to King’s School at
Tercanbury. The neighbouring clergy sent their sons there. It was
united by long tradition to the Cathedral: its headmaster was an
honorary Canon, and a past headmaster was the Archdeacon. Boys were
encouraged there to aspire to Holy Orders, and the education was such
as might prepare an honest lad to spend his life in God’s service. A
preparatory school was attached to it, and to this it was arranged that
Philip should go. Mr. Carey took him into Tercanbury one Thursday
afternoon towards the end of September. All day Philip had been excited