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.