Of Human Bondage (62 page)

  Philip looked forward to his return to London with
impatience. During the two months he spent at Blackstable Norah
wrote to him frequently, long letters in a bold, large hand, in
which with cheerful humour she described the little events of the
daily round, the domestic troubles of her landlady, rich food for
laughter, the comic vexations of her rehearsals – she was walking
on in an important spectacle at one of the London theatres – and
her odd adventures with the publishers of novelettes. Philip read a
great deal, bathed, played tennis, and sailed. At the beginning of
October he settled down in London to work for the Second Conjoint
examination. He was eager to pass it, since that ended the drudgery
of the curriculum; after it was done with the student became an
out-patients' clerk, and was brought in contact with men and women
as well as with text-books. Philip saw Norah every day.

  Lawson had been spending the summer at Poole, and
had a number of sketches to show of the harbour and of the beach.
He had a couple of commissions for portraits and proposed to stay
in London till the bad light drove him away. Hayward, in London
too, intended to spend the winter abroad, but remained week after
week from sheer inability to make up his mind to go. Hayward had
run to fat during the last two or three years – it was five years
since Philip first met him in Heidelberg – and he was prematurely
bald. He was very sensitive about it and wore his hair long to
conceal the unsightly patch on the crown of his head. His only
consolation was that his brow was now very noble. His blue eyes had
lost their colour; they had a listless droop; and his mouth, losing
the fulness of youth, was weak and pale. He still talked vaguely of
the things he was going to do in the future, but with less
conviction; and he was conscious that his friends no longer
believed in him: when he had drank two or three glasses of whiskey
he was inclined to be elegiac.

  "I'm a failure," he murmured, "I'm unfit for the
brutality of the struggle of life. All I can do is to stand aside
and let the vulgar throng hustle by in their pursuit of the good
things."

  He gave you the impression that to fail was a more
delicate, a more exquisite thing, than to succeed. He insinuated
that his aloofness was due to distaste for all that was common and
low. He talked beautifully of Plato.

  "I should have thought you'd got through with Plato
by now," said Philip impatiently.

  "Would you?" he asked, raising his eyebrows.

  He was not inclined to pursue the subject. He had
discovered of late the effective dignity of silence.

  "I don't see the use of reading the same thing over
and over again," said Philip. "That's only a laborious form of
idleness."

  "But are you under the impression that you have so
great a mind that you can understand the most profound writer at a
first reading?"

  "I don't want to understand him, I'm not a critic.
I'm not interested in him for his sake but for mine."

  "Why d'you read then?"

  "Partly for pleasure, because it's a habit and I'm
just as uncomfortable if I don't read as if I don't smoke, and
partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my
eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a
phrase, which has a meaning for ME, and it becomes part of me; I've
got out of the book all that's any use to me, and I can't get
anything more if I read it a dozen times. You see, it seems to me,
one's like a closed bud, and most of what one reads and does has no
effect at all; but there are certain things that have a peculiar
significance for one, and they open a petal; and the petals open
one by one; and at last the flower is there."

  Philip was not satisfied with his metaphor, but he
did not know how else to explain a thing which he felt and yet was
not clear about.

  "You want to do things, you want to become things,"
said Hayward, with a shrug of the shoulders. "It's so vulgar."

  Philip knew Hayward very well by now. He was weak
and vain, so vain that you had to be on the watch constantly not to
hurt his feelings; he mingled idleness and idealism so that he
could not separate them. At Lawson's studio one day he met a
journalist, who was charmed by his conversation, and a week later
the editor of a paper wrote to suggest that he should do some
criticism for him. For forty-eight hours Hayward lived in an agony
of indecision. He had talked of getting occupation of this sort so
long that he had not the face to refuse outright, but the thought
of doing anything filled him with panic. At last he declined the
offer and breathed freely.

  "It would have interfered with my work," he told
Philip.

  "What work?" asked Philip brutally.

  "My inner life," he answered.

  Then he went on to say beautiful things about Amiel,
the professor of Geneva, whose brilliancy promised achievement
which was never fulfilled; till at his death the reason of his
failure and the excuse were at once manifest in the minute,
wonderful journal which was found among his papers. Hayward smiled
enigmatically.

  But Hayward could still talk delightfully about
books; his taste was exquisite and his discrimination elegant; and
he had a constant interest in ideas, which made him an entertaining
companion. They meant nothing to him really, since they never had
any effect on him; but he treated them as he might have pieces of
china in an auction-room, handling them with pleasure in their
shape and their glaze, pricing them in his mind; and then, putting
them back into their case, thought of them no more.

  And it was Hayward who made a momentous discovery.
One evening, after due preparation, he took Philip and Lawson to a
tavern situated in Beak Street, remarkable not only in itself and
for its history – it had memories of eighteenth-century glories
which excited the romantic imagination – but for its snuff, which
was the best in London, and above all for its punch. Hayward led
them into a large, long room, dingily magnificent, with huge
pictures on the walls of nude women: they were vast allegories of
the school of Haydon; but smoke, gas, and the London atmosphere had
given them a richness which made them look like old masters. The
dark panelling, the massive, tarnished gold of the cornice, the
mahogany tables, gave the room an air of sumptuous comfort, and the
leather-covered seats along the wall were soft and easy. There was
a ram's head on a table opposite the door, and this contained the
celebrated snuff. They ordered punch. They drank it. It was hot rum
punch. The pen falters when it attempts to treat of the excellence
thereof; the sober vocabulary, the sparse epithet of this
narrative, are inadequate to the task; and pompous terms, jewelled,
exotic phrases rise to the excited fancy. It warmed the blood and
cleared the head; it filled the soul with well-being; it disposed
the mind at once to utter wit and to appreciate the wit of others;
it had the vagueness of music and the precision of mathematics.
Only one of its qualities was comparable to anything else: it had
the warmth of a good heart; but its taste, its smell, its feel,
were not to be described in words. Charles Lamb, with his infinite
tact, attempting to, might have drawn charming pictures of the life
of his day; Lord Byron in a stanza of Don Juan, aiming at the
impossible, might have achieved the sublime; Oscar Wilde, heaping
jewels of Ispahan upon brocades of Byzantium, might have created a
troubling beauty. Considering it, the mind reeled under visions of
the feasts of Elagabalus; and the subtle harmonies of Debussy
mingled with the musty, fragrant romance of chests in which have
been kept old clothes, ruffs, hose, doublets, of a forgotten
generation, and the wan odour of lilies of the valley and the
savour of Cheddar cheese.

  Hayward discovered the tavern at which this
priceless beverage was to be obtained by meeting in the street a
man called Macalister who had been at Cambridge with him. He was a
stockbroker and a philosopher. He was accustomed to go to the
tavern once a week; and soon Philip, Lawson, and Hayward got into
the habit of meeting there every Tuesday evening: change of manners
made it now little frequented, which was an advantage to persons
who took pleasure in conversation. Macalister was a big-boned
fellow, much too short for his width, with a large, fleshy face and
a soft voice. He was a student of Kant and judged everything from
the standpoint of pure reason. He was fond of expounding his
doctrines. Philip listened with excited interest. He had long come
to the conclusion that nothing amused him more than metaphysics,
but he was not so sure of their efficacy in the affairs of life.
The neat little system which he had formed as the result of his
meditations at Blackstable had not been of conspicuous use during
his infatuation for Mildred. He could not be positive that reason
was much help in the conduct of life. It seemed to him that life
lived itself. He remembered very vividly the violence of the
emotion which had possessed him and his inability, as if he were
tied down to the ground with ropes, to react against it. He read
many wise things in books, but he could only judge from his own
experience (he did not know whether he was different from other
people); he did not calculate the pros and cons of an action, the
benefits which must befall him if he did it, the harm which might
result from the omission; but his whole being was urged on
irresistibly. He did not act with a part of himself but altogether.
The power that possessed him seemed to have nothing to do with
reason: all that reason did was to point out the methods of
obtaining what his whole soul was striving for.

  Macalister reminded him of the Categorical
Imperative.

  "Act so that every action of yours should be capable
of becoming a universal rule of action for all men."

  "That seems to me perfect nonsense," said
Philip.

  "You're a bold man to say that of anything stated by
Immanuel Kant," retorted Macalister.

  "Why? Reverence for what somebody said is a
stultifying quality: there's a damned sight too much reverence in
the world. Kant thought things not because they were true, but
because he was Kant."

  "Well, what is your objection to the Categorical
Imperative?" (They talked as though the fate of empires were in the
balance.)

  "It suggests that one can choose one's course by an
effort of will. And it suggests that reason is the surest guide.
Why should its dictates be any better than those of passion?
They're different. That's all."

  "You seem to be a contented slave of your
passions."

  "A slave because I can't help myself, but not a
contented one," laughed Philip.

  While he spoke he thought of that hot madness which
had driven him in pursuit of Mildred. He remembered how he had
chafed against it and how he had felt the degradation of it.

  "Thank God, I'm free from all that now," he
thought.

  And yet even as he said it he was not quite sure
whether he spoke sincerely. When he was under the influence of
passion he had felt a singular vigour, and his mind had worked with
unwonted force. He was more alive, there was an excitement in sheer
being, an eager vehemence of soul, which made life now a trifle
dull. For all the misery he had endured there was a compensation in
that sense of rushing, overwhelming existence.

  But Philip's unlucky words engaged him in a
discussion on the freedom of the will, and Macalister, with his
well-stored memory, brought out argument after argument. He had a
mind that delighted in dialectics, and he forced Philip to
contradict himself; he pushed him into corners from which he could
only escape by damaging concessions; he tripped him up with logic
and battered him with authorities.

  At last Philip said:

  "Well, I can't say anything about other people. I
can only speak for myself. The illusion of free will is so strong
in my mind that I can't get away from it, but I believe it is only
an illusion. But it is an illusion which is one of the strongest
motives of my actions. Before I do anything I feel that I have
choice, and that influences what I do; but afterwards, when the
thing is done, I believe that it was inevitable from all
eternity."

  "What do you deduce from that?" asked Hayward.

  "Why, merely the futility of regret. It's no good
crying over spilt milk, because all the forces of the universe were
bent on spilling it."