Philip avoided the places he had known in happier times. The little
gatherings at the tavern in Beak Street were broken up: Macalister,
having let down his friends, no longer went there, and Hayward was at
the Cape. Only Lawson remained; and Philip, feeling that now the
painter and he had nothing in common, did not wish to see him; but one
Saturday afternoon, after dinner, having changed his clothes he walked
down Regent Street to go to the free library in St. Martin’s Lane,
meaning to spend the afternoon there, and suddenly found himself face
to face with him. His first instinct was to pass on without a word, but
Lawson did not give him the opportunity.
“Where on earth have you been all this time?” he cried.
“I?” said Philip.
“I wrote you and asked you to come to the studio for a beano and you
never even answered.”
“I didn’t get your letter.”
“No, I know. I went to the hospital to ask for you, and I saw my letter
in the rack. Have you chucked the Medical?”
Philip hesitated for a moment. He was ashamed to tell the truth, but
the shame he felt angered him, and he forced himself to speak. He could
not help reddening.
“Yes, I lost the little money I had. I couldn’t afford to go on with
it.”
“I say, I’m awfully sorry. What are you doing?”
“I’m a shop-walker.”
The words choked Philip, but he was determined not to shirk the truth.
He kept his eyes on Lawson and saw his embarrassment. Philip smiled
savagely.
“If you went into Lynn and Sedley, and made your way into the ‘made
robes’ department, you would see me in a frock coat, walking about with
a degage air and directing ladies who want to buy petticoats or
stockings. First to the right, madam, and second on the left.”
Lawson, seeing that Philip was making a jest of it, laughed awkwardly.
He did not know what to say. The picture that Philip called up
horrified him, but he was afraid to show his sympathy.
“That’s a bit of a change for you,” he said.
His words seemed absurd to him, and immediately he wished he had not
said them. Philip flushed darkly.
“A bit,” he said. “By the way, I owe you five bob.”
He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out some silver.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter. I’d forgotten all about it.”
“Go on, take it.”
Lawson received the money silently. They stood in the middle of the
pavement, and people jostled them as they passed. There was a sardonic
twinkle in Philip’s eyes, which made the painter intensely
uncomfortable, and he could not tell that Philip’s heart was heavy with
despair. Lawson wanted dreadfully to do something, but he did not know
what to do.
“I say, won’t you come to the studio and have a talk?”
“No,” said Philip.
“Why not?”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
He saw the pain come into Lawson’s eyes, he could not help it, he was
sorry, but he had to think of himself; he could not bear the thought of
discussing his situation, he could endure it only by determining
resolutely not to think about it. He was afraid of his weakness if once
he began to open his heart. Moreover, he took irresistible dislikes to
the places where he had been miserable: he remembered the humiliation
he had endured when he had waited in that studio, ravenous with hunger,
for Lawson to offer him a meal, and the last occasion when he had taken
the five shillings off him. He hated the sight of Lawson, because he
recalled those days of utter abasement.
“Then look here, come and dine with me one night. Choose your own
evening.”
Philip was touched with the painter’s kindness. All sorts of people
were strangely kind to him, he thought.
“It’s awfully good of you, old man, but I’d rather not.” He held out
his hand. “Good-bye.”
Lawson, troubled by a behaviour which seemed inexplicable, took his
hand, and Philip quickly limped away. His heart was heavy; and, as was
usual with him, he began to reproach himself for what he had done: he
did not know what madness of pride had made him refuse the offered
friendship. But he heard someone running behind him and presently
Lawson’s voice calling him; he stopped and suddenly the feeling of
hostility got the better of him; he presented to Lawson a cold, set
face.
“What is it?”
“I suppose you heard about Hayward, didn’t you?”
“I know he went to the Cape.”
“He died, you know, soon after landing.”
For a moment Philip did not answer. He could hardly believe his ears.
“How?” he asked.
“Oh, enteric. Hard luck, wasn’t it? I thought you mightn’t know. Gave
me a bit of a turn when I heard it.”
Lawson nodded quickly and walked away. Philip felt a shiver pass
through his heart. He had never before lost a friend of his own age,
for the death of Cronshaw, a man so much older than himself, had seemed
to come in the normal course of things. The news gave him a peculiar
shock. It reminded him of his own mortality, for like everyone else
Philip, knowing perfectly that all men must die, had no intimate
feeling that the same must apply to himself; and Hayward’s death,
though he had long ceased to have any warm feeling for him, affected
him deeply. He remembered on a sudden all the good talks they had had,
and it pained him to think that they would never talk with one another
again; he remembered their first meeting and the pleasant months they
had spent together in Heidelberg. Philip’s heart sank as he thought of
the lost years. He walked on mechanically, not noticing where he went,
and realised suddenly, with a movement of irritation, that instead of
turning down the Haymarket he had sauntered along Shaftesbury Avenue.
It bored him to retrace his steps; and besides, with that news, he did
not want to read, he wanted to sit alone and think. He made up his mind
to go to the British Museum. Solitude was now his only luxury. Since he
had been at Lynn’s he had often gone there and sat in front of the
groups from the Parthenon; and, not deliberately thinking, had allowed
their divine masses to rest his troubled soul. But this afternoon they
had nothing to say to him, and after a few minutes, impatiently, he
wandered out of the room. There were too many people, provincials with
foolish faces, foreigners poring over guide-books; their hideousness
besmirched the everlasting masterpieces, their restlessness troubled
the god’s immortal repose. He went into another room and here there was
hardly anyone. Philip sat down wearily. His nerves were on edge. He
could not get the people out of his mind. Sometimes at Lynn’s they
affected him in the same way, and he looked at them file past him with
horror; they were so ugly and there was such meanness in their faces,
it was terrifying; their features were distorted with paltry desires,
and you felt they were strange to any ideas of beauty. They had furtive
eyes and weak chins. There was no wickedness in them, but only
pettiness and vulgarity. Their humour was a low facetiousness.
Sometimes he found himself looking at them to see what animal they
resembled (he tried not to, for it quickly became an obsession,) and he
saw in them all the sheep or the horse or the fox or the goat. Human
beings filled him with disgust.
But presently the influence of the place descended upon him. He felt
quieter. He began to look absently at the tombstones with which the
room was lined. They were the work of Athenian stone masons of the
fourth and fifth centuries before Christ, and they were very simple,
work of no great talent but with the exquisite spirit of Athens upon
them; time had mellowed the marble to the colour of honey, so that
unconsciously one thought of the bees of Hymettus, and softened their
outlines. Some represented a nude figure, seated on a bench, some the
departure of the dead from those who loved him, and some the dead
clasping hands with one who remained behind. On all was the tragic word
farewell; that and nothing more. Their simplicity was infinitely
touching. Friend parted from friend, the son from his mother, and the
restraint made the survivor’s grief more poignant. It was so long, long
ago, and century upon century had passed over that unhappiness; for two
thousand years those who wept had been dust as those they wept for. Yet
the woe was alive still, and it filled Philip’s heart so that he felt
compassion spring up in it, and he said:
“Poor things, poor things.”
And it came to him that the gaping sight-seers and the fat strangers
with their guide-books, and all those mean, common people who thronged
the shop, with their trivial desires and vulgar cares, were mortal and
must die. They too loved and must part from those they loved, the son
from his mother, the wife from her husband; and perhaps it was more
tragic because their lives were ugly and sordid, and they knew nothing
that gave beauty to the world. There was one stone which was very
beautiful, a bas relief of two young men holding each other’s hand; and
the reticence of line, the simplicity, made one like to think that the
sculptor here had been touched with a genuine emotion. It was an
exquisite memorial to that than which the world offers but one thing
more precious, to a friendship; and as Philip looked at it, he felt the
tears come to his eyes. He thought of Hayward and his eager admiration
for him when first they met, and how disillusion had come and then
indifference, till nothing held them together but habit and old
memories. It was one of the queer things of life that you saw a person
every day for months and were so intimate with him that you could not
imagine existence without him; then separation came, and everything
went on in the same way, and the companion who had seemed essential
proved unnecessary. Your life proceeded and you did not even miss him.
Philip thought of those early days in Heidelberg when Hayward, capable
of great things, had been full of enthusiasm for the future, and how,
little by little, achieving nothing, he had resigned himself to
failure. Now he was dead. His death had been as futile as his life. He
died ingloriously, of a stupid disease, failing once more, even at the
end, to accomplish anything. It was just the same now as if he had
never lived.
Philip asked himself desperately what was the use of living at all. It
all seemed inane. It was the same with Cronshaw: it was quite
unimportant that he had lived; he was dead and forgotten, his book of
poems sold in remainder by second-hand booksellers; his life seemed to
have served nothing except to give a pushing journalist occasion to
write an article in a review. And Philip cried out in his soul:
“What is the use of it?”
The effort was so incommensurate with the result. The bright hopes of
youth had to be paid for at such a bitter price of disillusionment.
Pain and disease and unhappiness weighed down the scale so heavily.
What did it all mean? He thought of his own life, the high hopes with
which he had entered upon it, the limitations which his body forced
upon him, his friendlessness, and the lack of affection which had
surrounded his youth. He did not know that he had ever done anything
but what seemed best to do, and what a cropper he had come! Other men,
with no more advantages than he, succeeded, and others again, with many
more, failed. It seemed pure chance. The rain fell alike upon the just
and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.
Thinking of Cronshaw, Philip remembered the Persian rug which he had
given him, telling him that it offered an answer to his question upon
the meaning of life; and suddenly the answer occurred to him: he
chuckled: now that he had it, it was like one of the puzzles which you
worry over till you are shown the solution and then cannot imagine how
it could ever have escaped you. The answer was obvious. Life had no
meaning. On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space,
living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were
part of the planet’s history; and as there had been a beginning of life
upon it so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an
end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as
the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment.
Philip remembered the story of the Eastern King who, desiring to know
the history of man, was brought by a sage five hundred volumes; busy
with affairs of state, he bade him go and condense it; in twenty years
the sage returned and his history now was in no more than fifty
volumes, but the King, too old then to read so many ponderous tomes,
bade him go and shorten it once more; twenty years passed again and the
sage, old and gray, brought a single book in which was the knowledge
the King had sought; but the King lay on his death-bed, and he had no
time to read even that; and then the sage gave him the history of man
in a single line; it was this: he was born, he suffered, and he died.
There was no meaning in life, and man by living served no end. It was
immaterial whether he was born or not born, whether he lived or ceased
to live. Life was insignificant and death without consequence. Philip
exulted, as he had exulted in his boyhood when the weight of a belief
in God was lifted from his shoulders: it seemed to him that the last
burden of responsibility was taken from him; and for the first time he
was utterly free. His insignificance was turned to power, and he felt
himself suddenly equal with the cruel fate which had seemed to
persecute him; for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed of
its cruelty. What he did or left undone did not matter. Failure was
unimportant and success amounted to nothing. He was the most
inconsiderate creature in that swarming mass of mankind which for a
brief space occupied the surface of the earth; and he was almighty
because he had wrenched from chaos the secret of its nothingness.
Thoughts came tumbling over one another in Philip’s eager fancy, and he
took long breaths of joyous satisfaction. He felt inclined to leap and
sing. He had not been so happy for months.
“Oh, life,” he cried in his heart, “Oh life, where is thy sting?”
For the same uprush of fancy which had shown him with all the force of
mathematical demonstration that life had no meaning, brought with it
another idea; and that was why Cronshaw, he imagined, had given him the
Persian rug. As the weaver elaborated his pattern for no end but the
pleasure of his aesthetic sense, so might a man live his life, or if
one was forced to believe that his actions were outside his choosing,
so might a man look at his life, that it made a pattern. There was as
little need to do this as there was use. It was merely something he did
for his own pleasure. Out of the manifold events of his life, his
deeds, his feelings, his thoughts, he might make a design, regular,
elaborate, complicated, or beautiful; and though it might be no more
than an illusion that he had the power of selection, though it might be
no more than a fantastic legerdemain in which appearances were
interwoven with moonbeams, that did not matter: it seemed, and so to
him it was. In the vast warp of life (a river arising from no spring
and flowing endlessly to no sea), with the background to his fancies
that there was no meaning and that nothing was important, a man might
get a personal satisfaction in selecting the various strands that
worked out the pattern. There was one pattern, the most obvious,
perfect, and beautiful, in which a man was born, grew to manhood,
married, produced children, toiled for his bread, and died; but there
were others, intricate and wonderful, in which happiness did not enter
and in which success was not attempted; and in them might be discovered
a more troubling grace. Some lives, and Hayward’s was among them, the
blind indifference of chance cut off while the design was still
imperfect; and then the solace was comfortable that it did not matter;
other lives, such as Cronshaw’s, offered a pattern which was difficult
to follow, the point of view had to be shifted and old standards had to
be altered before one could understand that such a life was its own
justification. Philip thought that in throwing over the desire for
happiness he was casting aside the last of his illusions. His life had
seemed horrible when it was measured by its happiness, but now he
seemed to gather strength as he realised that it might be measured by
something else. Happiness mattered as little as pain. They came in,
both of them, as all the other details of his life came in, to the
elaboration of the design. He seemed for an instant to stand above the
accidents of his existence, and he felt that they could not affect him
again as they had done before. Whatever happened to him now would be
one more motive to add to the complexity of the pattern, and when the
end approached he would rejoice in its completion. It would be a work
of art, and it would be none the less beautiful because he alone knew
of its existence, and with his death it would at once cease to be.
Philip was happy.