XXVI…

XXVI

Philip had spent three months in Heidelberg when one morning the Frau Professor told him that an Englishman named Hayward was coming to stay in the house, and the same evening at supper he saw a new face. For some days the family had lived in a state of excitement. First, as the result of heaven knows what scheming, by dint of humble prayers and veiled threats, the parents of the young Englishman to whom Fraulein Thekla was engaged had invited her to visit them in England, and she had set off with an album of water colours to show how accomplished she was and a bundle of letters to prove how deeply the young man had compromised himself. A week later Fraulein Hedwig with radiant smiles announced that the lieutenant of her affections was coming to Heidelberg with his father and mother. Exhausted by the importunity of their son and touched by the dowry which Fraulein Hedwig’s father offered, the lieutenant’s parents had consented to pass through Heidelberg to make the young woman’s acquaintance. The interview was satisfactory and Fraulein Hedwig had the satisfaction of showing her lover in the Stadtgarten to the whole of Frau Professor Erlin’s household. The silent old ladies who sat at the top of the table near the Frau Professor were in a flutter, and when Fraulein Hedwig said she was to go home at once for the formal engagement to take place, the Frau Professor, regardless of expense, said she would give a Maibowle. Professor Erlin prided himself on his skill in preparing this mild intoxicant, and after supper the large bowl of hock and soda, with scented herbs floating in it and wild strawberries, was placed with solemnity on the round table in the drawing-room. Fraulein Anna teased Philip about the departure of his lady-love, and he felt very uncomfortable and rather melancholy. Fraulein Hedwig sang several songs, Fraulein Anna played the Wedding March, and the Professor sang Die Wacht am Rhein. Amid all this jollification Philip paid little attention to the new arrival. They had sat opposite one another at supper, but Philip was chattering busily with Fraulein Hedwig, and the stranger, knowing no German, had eaten his food in silence. Philip, observing that he wore a pale blue tie, had on that account taken a sudden dislike to him. He was a man of twenty-six, very fair, with long, wavy hair through which he passed his hand frequently with a careless gesture. His eyes were large and blue, but the blue was very pale, and they looked rather tired already. He was clean-shaven, and his mouth, notwithstanding its thin lips, was well-shaped. Fraulein Anna took an interest in physiognomy, and she made Philip notice afterwards how finely shaped was his skull, and how weak was the lower part of his face. The head, she remarked, was the head of a thinker, but the jaw lacked character. Fraulein Anna, foredoomed to a spinster’s life, with her high cheek-bones and large misshapen nose, laid great stress upon character. While they talked of him he stood a little apart from the others, watching the noisy party with a good-humoured but faintly supercilious expression. He was tall and slim. He held himself with a deliberate grace. Weeks, one of the American students, seeing him alone, went up and began to talk to him. The pair were oddly contrasted: the American very neat in his black coat and pepper-and-salt trousers, thin and dried-up, with something of ecclesiastical unction already in his manner; and the Englishman in his loose tweed suit, large-limbed and slow of gesture.

Philip did not speak to the newcomer till next day. They found themselves alone on the balcony of the drawing-room before dinner. Hayward addressed him.

“You’re English, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Is the food always as bad it was last night?”

“It’s always about the same.”

“Beastly, isn’t it?”

“Beastly.”

Philip had found nothing wrong with the food at all, and in fact had eaten it in large quantities with appetite and enjoyment, but he did not want to show himself a person of so little discrimination as to think a dinner good which another thought execrable.

Fraulein Thekla’s visit to England made it necessary for her sister to do more in the house, and she could not often spare the time for long walks; and Fraulein Cacilie, with her long plait of fair hair and her little snub-nosed face, had of late shown a certain disinclination for society. Fraulein Hedwig was gone, and Weeks, the American who generally accompanied them on their rambles, had set out for a tour of South Germany. Philip was left a good deal to himself. Hayward sought his acquaintance; but Philip had an unfortunate trait: from shyness or from some atavistic inheritance of the cave-dweller, he always disliked people on first acquaintance; and it was not till he became used to them that he got over his first impression. It made him difficult of access. He received Hayward’s advances very shyly, and when Hayward asked him one day to go for a walk he accepted only because he could not think of a civil excuse. He made his usual apology, angry with himself for the flushing cheeks he could not control, and trying to carry it off with a laugh.

“I’m afraid I can’t walk very fast.”

“Good heavens, I don’t walk for a wager. I prefer to stroll. Don’t you remember the chapter in Marius where Pater talks of the gentle exercise of walking as the best incentive to conversation?”

Philip was a good listener; though he often thought of clever things to say, it was seldom till after the opportunity to say them had passed; but Hayward was communicative; anyone more experienced than Philip might have thought he liked to hear himself talk. His supercilious attitude impressed Philip. He could not help admiring, and yet being awed by, a man who faintly despised so many things which Philip had looked upon as almost sacred. He cast down the fetish of exercise, damning with the contemptuous word pot-hunters all those who devoted themselves to its various forms; and Philip did not realise that he was merely putting up in its stead the other fetish of culture.

They wandered up to the castle, and sat on the terrace that overlooked the town. It nestled in the valley along the pleasant Neckar with a comfortable friendliness. The smoke from the chimneys hung over it, a pale blue haze; and the tall roofs, the spires of the churches, gave it a pleasantly medieval air. There was a homeliness in it which warmed the heart. Hayward talked of Richard Feverel and Madame Bovary, of Verlaine, Dante, and Matthew Arnold. In those days Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam was known only to the elect, and Hayward repeated it to Philip. He was very fond of reciting poetry, his own and that of others, which he did in a monotonous sing-song. By the time they reached home Philip’s distrust of Hayward was changed to enthusiastic admiration.

They made a practice of walking together every afternoon, and Philip learned presently something of Hayward’s circumstances. He was the son of a country judge, on whose death some time before he had inherited three hundred a year. His record at Charterhouse was so brilliant that when he went to Cambridge the Master of Trinity Hall went out of his way to express his satisfaction that he was going to that college. He prepared himself for a distinguished career. He moved in the most intellectual circles: he read Browning with enthusiasm and turned up his well-shaped nose at Tennyson; he knew all the details of Shelley’s treatment of Harriet; he dabbled in the history of art (on the walls of his rooms were reproductions of pictures by G. F. Watts, Burne-Jones, and Botticelli); and he wrote not without distinction verses of a pessimistic character. His friends told one another that he was a man of excellent gifts, and he listened to them willingly when they prophesied his future eminence. In course of time he became an authority on art and literature. He came under the influence of Newman’s Apologia; the picturesqueness of the Roman Catholic faith appealed to his esthetic sensibility; and it was only the fear of his father’s wrath (a plain, blunt man of narrow ideas, who read Macaulay) which prevented him from ‘going over.’ When he only got a pass degree his friends were astonished; but he shrugged his shoulders and delicately insinuated that he was not the dupe of examiners. He made one feel that a first class was ever so slightly vulgar. He described one of the vivas with tolerant humour; some fellow in an outrageous collar was asking him questions in logic; it was infinitely tedious, and suddenly he noticed that he wore elastic-sided boots: it was grotesque and ridiculous; so he withdrew his mind and thought of the gothic beauty of the Chapel at King’s. But he had spent some delightful days at Cambridge; he had given better dinners than anyone he knew; and the conversation in his rooms had been often memorable. He quoted to Philip the exquisite epigram:

“They told me, Herakleitus, they told me you were dead.”

And now, when he related again the picturesque little anecdote about the examiner and his boots, he laughed.

“Of course it was folly,” he said, “but it was a folly in which there was something fine.”

Philip, with a little thrill, thought it magnificent.

Then Hayward went to London to read for the Bar. He had charming rooms in Clement’s Inn, with panelled walls, and he tried to make them look like his old rooms at the Hall. He had ambitions that were vaguely political, he described himself as a Whig, and he was put up for a club which was of Liberal but gentlemanly flavour. His idea was to practise at the Bar (he chose the Chancery side as less brutal), and get a seat for some pleasant constituency as soon as the various promises made him were carried out; meanwhile he went a great deal to the opera, and made acquaintance with a small number of charming people who admired the things that he admired. He joined a dining-club of which the motto was, The Whole, The Good, and The Beautiful. He formed a platonic friendship with a lady some years older than himself, who lived in Kensington Square; and nearly every afternoon he drank tea with her by the light of shaded candles, and talked of George Meredith and Walter Pater. It was notorious that any fool could pass the examinations of the Bar Council, and he pursued his studies in a dilatory fashion. When he was ploughed for his final he looked upon it as a personal affront. At the same time the lady in Kensington Square told him that her husband was coming home from India on leave, and was a man, though worthy in every way, of a commonplace mind, who would not understand a young man’s frequent visits. Hayward felt that life was full of ugliness, his soul revolted from the thought of affronting again the cynicism of examiners, and he saw something rather splendid in kicking away the ball which lay at his feet. He was also a good deal in debt: it was difficult to live in London like a gentleman on three hundred a year; and his heart yearned for the Venice and Florence which John Ruskin had so magically described. He felt that he was unsuited to the vulgar bustle of the Bar, for he had discovered that it was not sufficient to put your name on a door to get briefs; and modern politics seemed to lack nobility. He felt himself a poet. He disposed of his rooms in Clement’s Inn and went to Italy. He had spent a winter in Florence and a winter in Rome, and now was passing his second summer abroad in Germany so that he might read Goethe in the original.

Hayward had one gift which was very precious. He had a real feeling for literature, and he could impart his own passion with an admirable fluency. He could throw himself into sympathy with a writer and see all that was best in him, and then he could talk about him with understanding. Philip had read a great deal, but he had read without discrimination everything that he happened to come across, and it was very good for him now to meet someone who could guide his taste. He borrowed books from the small lending library which the town possessed and began reading all the wonderful things that Hayward spoke of. He did not read always with enjoyment but invariably with perseverance. He was eager for self-improvement. He felt himself very ignorant and very humble. By the end of August, when Weeks returned from South Germany, Philip was completely under Hayward’s influence. Hayward did not like Weeks. He deplored the American’s black coat and pepper-and-salt trousers, and spoke with a scornful shrug of his New England conscience. Philip listened complacently to the abuse of a man who had gone out of his way to be kind to him, but when Weeks in his turn made disagreeable remarks about Hayward he lost his temper.

“Your new friend looks like a poet,” said Weeks, with a thin smile on his careworn, bitter mouth.

“He is a poet.”

“Did he tell you so? In America we should call him a pretty fair specimen of a waster.”

“Well, we’re not in America,” said Philip frigidly.

“How old is he? Twenty-five? And he does nothing but stay in pensions and write poetry.”

“You don’t know him,” said Philip hotly.

“Oh yes, I do: I’ve met a hundred and forty-seven of him.”

Weeks’ eyes twinkled, but Philip, who did not understand American humour, pursed his lips and looked severe. Weeks to Philip seemed a man of middle age, but he was in point of fact little more than thirty. He had a long, thin body and the scholar’s stoop; his head was large and ugly; he had pale scanty hair and an earthy skin; his thin mouth and thin, long nose, and the great protuberance of his frontal bones, gave him an uncouth look. He was cold and precise in his manner, a bloodless man, without passion; but he had a curious vein of frivolity which disconcerted the serious-minded among whom his instincts naturally threw him. He was studying theology in Heidelberg, but the other theological students of his own nationality looked upon him with suspicion. He was very unorthodox, which frightened them; and his freakish humour excited their disapproval.

“How can you have known a hundred and forty-seven of him?” asked Philip seriously.

“I’ve met him in the Latin Quarter in Paris, and I’ve met him in pensions in Berlin and Munich. He lives in small hotels in Perugia and Assisi. He stands by the dozen before the Botticellis in Florence, and he sits on all the benches of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. In Italy he drinks a little too much wine, and in Germany he drinks a great deal too much beer. He always admires the right thing whatever the right thing is, and one of these days he’s going to write a great work. Think of it, there are a hundred and forty-seven great works reposing in the bosoms of a hundred and forty-seven great men, and the tragic thing is that not one of those hundred and forty-seven great works will ever be written. And yet the world goes on.”

Weeks spoke seriously, but his gray eyes twinkled a little at the end of his long speech, and Philip flushed when he saw that the American was making fun of him.

“You do talk rot,” he said crossly.

XXVII

Weeks had two little rooms at the back of Frau Erlin’s house, and one of them, arranged as a parlour, was comfortable enough for him to invite people to sit in. After supper, urged perhaps by the impish humour which was the despair of his friends in Cambridge, Mass., he often asked Philip and Hayward to come in for a chat. He received them with elaborate courtesy and insisted on their sitting in the only two comfortable chairs in the room. Though he did not drink himself, with a politeness of which Philip recognised the irony, he put a couple of bottles of beer at Hayward’s elbow, and he insisted on lighting matches whenever in the heat of argument Hayward’s pipe went out. At the beginning of their acquaintance Hayward, as a member of so celebrated a university, had adopted a patronising attitude towards Weeks, who was a graduate of Harvard; and when by chance the conversation turned upon the Greek tragedians, a subject upon which Hayward felt he spoke with authority, he had assumed the air that it was his part to give information rather than to exchange ideas. Weeks had listened politely, with smiling modesty, till Hayward finished; then he asked one or two insidious questions, so innocent in appearance that Hayward, not seeing into what a quandary they led him, answered blandly; Weeks made a courteous objection, then a correction of fact, after that a quotation from some little known Latin commentator, then a reference to a German authority; and the fact was disclosed that he was a scholar. With smiling ease, apologetically, Weeks tore to pieces all that Hayward had said; with elaborate civility he displayed the superficiality of his attainments. He mocked him with gentle irony. Philip could not help seeing that Hayward looked a perfect fool, and Hayward had not the sense to hold his tongue; in his irritation, his self-assurance undaunted, he attempted to argue: he made wild statements and Weeks amicably corrected them; he reasoned falsely and Weeks proved that he was absurd: Weeks confessed that he had taught Greek Literature at Harvard. Hayward gave a laugh of scorn.

“I might have known it. Of course you read Greek like a schoolmaster,” he said. “I read it like a poet.”

“And do you find it more poetic when you don’t quite know what it means? I thought it was only in revealed religion that a mistranslation improved the sense.”

At last, having finished the beer, Hayward left Weeks’ room hot and dishevelled; with an angry gesture he said to Philip:

“Of course the man’s a pedant. He has no real feeling for beauty. Accuracy is the virtue of clerks. It’s the spirit of the Greeks that we aim at. Weeks is like that fellow who went to hear Rubenstein and complained that he played false notes. False notes! What did they matter when he played divinely?”

Philip, not knowing how many incompetent people have found solace in these false notes, was much impressed.

Hayward could never resist the opportunity which Weeks offered him of regaining ground lost on a previous occasion, and Weeks was able with the greatest ease to draw him into a discussion. Though he could not help seeing how small his attainments were beside the American’s, his British pertinacity, his wounded vanity (perhaps they are the same thing), would not allow him to give up the struggle. Hayward seemed to take a delight in displaying his ignorance, self-satisfaction, and wrongheadedness. Whenever Hayward said something which was illogical, Weeks in a few words would show the falseness of his reasoning, pause for a moment to enjoy his triumph, and then hurry on to another subject as though Christian charity impelled him to spare the vanquished foe. Philip tried sometimes to put in something to help his friend, and Weeks gently crushed him, but so kindly, differently from the way in which he answered Hayward, that even Philip, outrageously sensitive, could not feel hurt. Now and then, losing his calm as he felt himself more and more foolish, Hayward became abusive, and only the American’s smiling politeness prevented the argument from degenerating into a quarrel. On these occasions when Hayward left Weeks’ room he muttered angrily:

“Damned Yankee!”

That settled it. It was a perfect answer to an argument which had seemed unanswerable.

Though they began by discussing all manner of subjects in Weeks’ little room eventually the conversation always turned to religion: the theological student took a professional interest in it, and Hayward welcomed a subject in which hard facts need not disconcert him; when feeling is the gauge you can snap your angers at logic, and when your logic is weak that is very agreeable. Hayward found it difficult to explain his beliefs to Philip without a great flow of words; but it was clear (and this fell in with Philip’s idea of the natural order of things), that he had been brought up in the church by law established. Though he had now given up all idea of becoming a Roman Catholic, he still looked upon that communion with sympathy. He had much to say in its praise, and he compared favourably its gorgeous ceremonies with the simple services of the Church of England. He gave Philip Newman’s Apologia to read, and Philip, finding it very dull, nevertheless read it to the end.

“Read it for its style, not for its matter,” said Hayward.

He talked enthusiastically of the music at the Oratory, and said charming things about the connection between incense and the devotional spirit. Weeks listened to him with his frigid smile.

“You think it proves the truth of Roman Catholicism that John Henry Newman wrote good English and that Cardinal Manning has a picturesque appearance?”

Hayward hinted that he had gone through much trouble with his soul. For a year he had swum in a sea of darkness. He passed his fingers through his fair, waving hair and told them that he would not for five hundred pounds endure again those agonies of mind. Fortunately he had reached calm waters at last.

“But what do you believe?” asked Philip, who was never satisfied with vague statements.

“I believe in the Whole, the Good, and the Beautiful.”

Hayward with his loose large limbs and the fine carriage of his head looked very handsome when he said this, and he said it with an air.

“Is that how you would describe your religion in a census paper?” asked Weeks, in mild tones.

“I hate the rigid definition: it’s so ugly, so obvious. If you like I will say that I believe in the church of the Duke of Wellington and Mr. Gladstone.”

“That’s the Church of England,” said Philip.

“Oh wise young man!” retorted Hayward, with a smile which made Philip blush, for he felt that in putting into plain words what the other had expressed in a paraphrase, he had been guilty of vulgarity. “I belong to the Church of England. But I love the gold and the silk which clothe the priest of Rome, and his celibacy, and the confessional, and purgatory: and in the darkness of an Italian cathedral, incense-laden and mysterious, I believe with all my heart in the miracle of the Mass. In Venice I have seen a fisherwoman come in, barefoot, throw down her basket of fish by her side, fall on her knees, and pray to the Madonna; and that I felt was the real faith, and I prayed and believed with her. But I believe also in Aphrodite and Apollo and the Great God Pan.”

He had a charming voice, and he chose his words as he spoke; he uttered them almost rhythmically. He would have gone on, but Weeks opened a second bottle of beer.

“Let me give you something to drink.”

Hayward turned to Philip with the slightly condescending gesture which so impressed the youth.

“Now are you satisfied?” he asked.

Philip, somewhat bewildered, confessed that he was.

“I’m disappointed that you didn’t add a little Buddhism,” said Weeks. “And I confess I have a sort of sympathy for Mahomet; I regret that you should have left him out in the cold.”

Hayward laughed, for he was in a good humour with himself that evening, and the ring of his sentences still sounded pleasant in his ears. He emptied his glass.

“I didn’t expect you to understand me,” he answered. “With your cold American intelligence you can only adopt the critical attitude. Emerson and all that sort of thing. But what is criticism? Criticism is purely destructive; anyone can destroy, but not everyone can build up. You are a pedant, my dear fellow. The important thing is to construct: I am constructive; I am a poet.”

Weeks looked at him with eyes which seemed at the same time to be quite grave and yet to be smiling brightly.

“I think, if you don’t mind my saying so, you’re a little drunk.”

“Nothing to speak of,” answered Hayward cheerfully. “And not enough for me to be unable to overwhelm you in argument. But come, I have unbosomed my soul; now tell us what your religion is.”

Weeks put his head on one side so that he looked like a sparrow on a perch.

“I’ve been trying to find that out for years. I think I’m a Unitarian.”

“But that’s a dissenter,” said Philip.

He could not imagine why they both burst into laughter, Hayward uproariously, and Weeks with a funny chuckle.

“And in England dissenters aren’t gentlemen, are they?” asked Weeks.

“Well, if you ask me point-blank, they’re not,” replied Philip rather crossly.

He hated being laughed at, and they laughed again.

“And will you tell me what a gentleman is?” asked Weeks.

“Oh, I don’t know; everyone knows what it is.”

“Are you a gentleman?”

No doubt had ever crossed Philip’s mind on the subject, but he knew it was not a thing to state of oneself.

“If a man tells you he’s a gentleman you can bet your boots he isn’t,” he retorted.

“Am I a gentleman?”

Philip’s truthfulness made it difficult for him to answer, but he was naturally polite.

“Oh, well, you’re different,” he said. “You’re American, aren’t you?”

“I suppose we may take it that only Englishmen are gentlemen,” said Weeks gravely.

Philip did not contradict him.

“Couldn’t you give me a few more particulars?” asked Weeks.

Philip reddened, but, growing angry, did not care if he made himself ridiculous.

“I can give you plenty.” He remembered his uncle’s saying that it took three generations to make a gentleman: it was a companion proverb to the silk purse and the sow’s ear. “First of all he’s the son of a gentleman, and he’s been to a public school, and to Oxford or Cambridge.”

“Edinburgh wouldn’t do, I suppose?” asked Weeks.

“And he talks English like a gentleman, and he wears the right sort of things, and if he’s a gentleman he can always tell if another chap’s a gentleman.”

It seemed rather lame to Philip as he went on, but there it was: that was what he meant by the word, and everyone he had ever known had meant that too.

“It is evident to me that I am not a gentleman,” said Weeks. “I don’t see why you should have been so surprised because I was a dissenter.”

“I don’t quite know what a Unitarian is,” said Philip.

Weeks in his odd way again put his head on one side: you almost expected him to twitter.

“A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves in almost everything that anybody else believes, and he has a very lively sustaining faith in he doesn’t quite know what.”

“I don’t see why you should make fun of me,” said Philip. “I really want to know.”

“My dear friend, I’m not making fun of you. I have arrived at that definition after years of great labour and the most anxious, nerve-racking study.”

When Philip and Hayward got up to go, Weeks handed Philip a little book in a paper cover.

“I suppose you can read French pretty well by now. I wonder if this would amuse you.”

Philip thanked him and, taking the book, looked at the title. It was Renan’s Vie de Jesus.

XXVIII

It occurred neither to Hayward nor to Weeks that the conversations which helped them to pass an idle evening were being turned over afterwards in Philip’s active brain. It had never struck him before that religion was a matter upon which discussion was possible. To him it meant the Church of England, and not to believe in its tenets was a sign of wilfulness which could not fail of punishment here or hereafter. There was some doubt in his mind about the chastisement of unbelievers. It was possible that a merciful judge, reserving the flames of hell for the heathen—Mahommedans, Buddhists, and the rest—would spare Dissenters and Roman Catholics (though at the cost of how much humiliation when they were made to realise their error!), and it was also possible that He would be pitiful to those who had had no chance of learning the truth,—this was reasonable enough, though such were the activities of the Missionary Society there could not be many in this condition—but if the chance had been theirs and they had neglected it (in which category were obviously Roman Catholics and Dissenters), the punishment was sure and merited. It was clear that the miscreant was in a parlous state. Perhaps Philip had not been taught it in so many words, but certainly the impression had been given him that only members of the Church of England had any real hope of eternal happiness.

One of the things that Philip had heard definitely stated was that the unbeliever was a wicked and a vicious man; but Weeks, though he believed in hardly anything that Philip believed, led a life of Christian purity. Philip had received little kindness in his life, and he was touched by the American’s desire to help him: once when a cold kept him in bed for three days, Weeks nursed him like a mother. There was neither vice nor wickedness in him, but only sincerity and loving-kindness. It was evidently possible to be virtuous and unbelieving.

Also Philip had been given to understand that people adhered to other faiths only from obstinacy or self-interest: in their hearts they knew they were false; they deliberately sought to deceive others. Now, for the sake of his German he had been accustomed on Sunday mornings to attend the Lutheran service, but when Hayward arrived he began instead to go with him to Mass. He noticed that, whereas the Protestant church was nearly empty and the congregation had a listless air, the Jesuit on the other hand was crowded and the worshippers seemed to pray with all their hearts. They had not the look of hypocrites. He was surprised at the contrast; for he knew of course that the Lutherans, whose faith was closer to that of the Church of England, on that account were nearer the truth than the Roman Catholics. Most of the men—it was largely a masculine congregation—were South Germans; and he could not help saying to himself that if he had been born in South Germany he would certainly have been a Roman Catholic. He might just as well have been born in a Roman Catholic country as in England; and in England as well in a Wesleyan, Baptist, or Methodist family as in one that fortunately belonged to the church by law established. He was a little breathless at the danger he had run. Philip was on friendly terms with the little Chinaman who sat at table with him twice each day. His name was Sung. He was always smiling, affable, and polite. It seemed strange that he should frizzle in hell merely because he was a Chinaman; but if salvation was possible whatever a man’s faith was, there did not seem to be any particular advantage in belonging to the Church of England.

Philip, more puzzled than he had ever been in his life, sounded Weeks. He had to be careful, for he was very sensitive to ridicule; and the acidulous humour with which the American treated the Church of England disconcerted him. Weeks only puzzled him more. He made Philip acknowledge that those South Germans whom he saw in the Jesuit church were every bit as firmly convinced of the truth of Roman Catholicism as he was of that of the Church of England, and from that he led him to admit that the Mahommedan and the Buddhist were convinced also of the truth of their respective religions. It looked as though knowing that you were right meant nothing; they all knew they were right. Weeks had no intention of undermining the boy’s faith, but he was deeply interested in religion, and found it an absorbing topic of conversation. He had described his own views accurately when he said that he very earnestly disbelieved in almost everything that other people believed. Once Philip asked him a question, which he had heard his uncle put when the conversation at the vicarage had fallen upon some mildly rationalistic work which was then exciting discussion in the newspapers.

“But why should you be right and all those fellows like St. Anselm and St. Augustine be wrong?”

“You mean that they were very clever and learned men, while you have grave doubts whether I am either?” asked Weeks.

“Yes,” answered Philip uncertainly, for put in that way his question seemed impertinent.

“St. Augustine believed that the earth was flat and that the sun turned round it.”

“I don’t know what that proves.”

“Why, it proves that you believe with your generation. Your saints lived in an age of faith, when it was practically impossible to disbelieve what to us is positively incredible.”

“Then how d’you know that we have the truth now?”

“I don’t.”

Philip thought this over for a moment, then he said:

“I don’t see why the things we believe absolutely now shouldn’t be just as wrong as what they believed in the past.”

“Neither do I.”

“Then how can you believe anything at all?”

“I don’t know.”

Philip asked Weeks what he thought of Hayward’s religion.

“Men have always formed gods in their own image,” said Weeks. “He believes in the picturesque.”

Philip paused for a little while, then he said:

“I don’t see why one should believe in God at all.”

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than he realised that he had ceased to do so. It took his breath away like a plunge into cold water. He looked at Weeks with startled eyes. Suddenly he felt afraid. He left Weeks as quickly as he could. He wanted to be alone. It was the most startling experience that he had ever had. He tried to think it all out; it was very exciting, since his whole life seemed concerned (he thought his decision on this matter must profoundly affect its course) and a mistake might lead to eternal damnation; but the more he reflected the more convinced he was; and though during the next few weeks he read books, aids to scepticism, with eager interest it was only to confirm him in what he felt instinctively. The fact was that he had ceased to believe not for this reason or the other, but because he had not the religious temperament. Faith had been forced upon him from the outside. It was a matter of environment and example. A new environment and a new example gave him the opportunity to find himself. He put off the faith of his childhood quite simply, like a cloak that he no longer needed. At first life seemed strange and lonely without the belief which, though he never realised it, had been an unfailing support. He felt like a man who has leaned on a stick and finds himself forced suddenly to walk without assistance. It really seemed as though the days were colder and the nights more solitary. But he was upheld by the excitement; it seemed to make life a more thrilling adventure; and in a little while the stick which he had thrown aside, the cloak which had fallen from his shoulders, seemed an intolerable burden of which he had been eased. The religious exercises which for so many years had been forced upon him were part and parcel of religion to him. He thought of the collects and epistles which he had been made to learn by heart, and the long services at the Cathedral through which he had sat when every limb itched with the desire for movement; and he remembered those walks at night through muddy roads to the parish church at Blackstable, and the coldness of that bleak building; he sat with his feet like ice, his fingers numb and heavy, and all around was the sickly odour of pomatum. Oh, he had been so bored! His heart leaped when he saw he was free from all that.

He was surprised at himself because he ceased to believe so easily, and, not knowing that he felt as he did on account of the subtle workings of his inmost nature, he ascribed the certainty he had reached to his own cleverness. He was unduly pleased with himself. With youth’s lack of sympathy for an attitude other than its own he despised not a little Weeks and Hayward because they were content with the vague emotion which they called God and would not take the further step which to himself seemed so obvious. One day he went alone up a certain hill so that he might see a view which, he knew not why, filled him always with wild exhilaration. It was autumn now, but often the days were cloudless still, and then the sky seemed to glow with a more splendid light: it was as though nature consciously sought to put a fuller vehemence into the remaining days of fair weather. He looked down upon the plain, a-quiver with the sun, stretching vastly before him: in the distance were the roofs of Mannheim and ever so far away the dimness of Worms. Here and there a more piercing glitter was the Rhine. The tremendous spaciousness of it was glowing with rich gold. Philip, as he stood there, his heart beating with sheer joy, thought how the tempter had stood with Jesus on a high mountain and shown him the kingdoms of the earth. To Philip, intoxicated with the beauty of the scene, it seemed that it was the whole world which was spread before him, and he was eager to step down and enjoy it. He was free from degrading fears and free from prejudice. He could go his way without the intolerable dread of hell-fire. Suddenly he realised that he had lost also that burden of responsibility which made every action of his life a matter of urgent consequence. He could breathe more freely in a lighter air. He was responsible only to himself for the things he did. Freedom! He was his own master at last. From old habit, unconsciously he thanked God that he no longer believed in Him.

Drunk with pride in his intelligence and in his fearlessness, Philip entered deliberately upon a new life. But his loss of faith made less difference in his behaviour than he expected. Though he had thrown on one side the Christian dogmas it never occurred to him to criticise the Christian ethics; he accepted the Christian virtues, and indeed thought it fine to practise them for their own sake, without a thought of reward or punishment. There was small occasion for heroism in the Frau Professor’s house, but he was a little more exactly truthful than he had been, and he forced himself to be more than commonly attentive to the dull, elderly ladies who sometimes engaged him in conversation. The gentle oath, the violent adjective, which are typical of our language and which he had cultivated before as a sign of manliness, he now elaborately eschewed.

Having settled the whole matter to his satisfaction he sought to put it out of his mind, but that was more easily said than done; and he could not prevent the regrets nor stifle the misgivings which sometimes tormented him. He was so young and had so few friends that immortality had no particular attractions for him, and he was able without trouble to give up belief in it; but there was one thing which made him wretched; he told himself that he was unreasonable, he tried to laugh himself out of such pathos; but the tears really came to his eyes when he thought that he would never see again the beautiful mother whose love for him had grown more precious as the years since her death passed on. And sometimes, as though the influence of innumerable ancestors, Godfearing and devout, were working in him unconsciously, there seized him a panic fear that perhaps after all it was all true, and there was, up there behind the blue sky, a jealous God who would punish in everlasting flames the atheist. At these times his reason could offer him no help, he imagined the anguish of a physical torment which would last endlessly, he felt quite sick with fear and burst into a violent sweat. At last he would say to himself desperately:

“After all, it’s not my fault. I can’t force myself to believe. If there is a God after all and he punishes me because I honestly don’t believe in Him I can’t help it.”

XXIX

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.

XXX

Philip was restless and dissatisfied. Hayward’s poetic allusions troubled his imagination, and his soul yearned for romance. At least that was how he put it to himself.

And it happened that an incident was taking place in Frau Erlin’s house which increased Philip’s preoccupation with the matter of sex. Two or three times on his walks among the hills he had met Fraulein Cacilie wandering by herself. He had passed her with a bow, and a few yards further on had seen the Chinaman. He thought nothing of it; but one evening on his way home, when night had already fallen, he passed two people walking very close together. Hearing his footstep, they separated quickly, and though he could not see well in the darkness he was almost certain they were Cacilie and Herr Sung. Their rapid movement apart suggested that they had been walking arm in arm. Philip was puzzled and surprised. He had never paid much attention to Fraulein Cacilie. She was a plain girl, with a square face and blunt features. She could not have been more than sixteen, since she still wore her long fair hair in a plait. That evening at supper he looked at her curiously; and, though of late she had talked little at meals, she addressed him.

“Where did you go for your walk today, Herr Carey?” she asked.

“Oh, I walked up towards the Konigstuhl.”

“I didn’t go out,” she volunteered. “I had a headache.”

The Chinaman, who sat next to her, turned round.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I hope it’s better now.”

Fraulein Cacilie was evidently uneasy, for she spoke again to Philip.

“Did you meet many people on the way?”

Philip could not help reddening when he told a downright lie.

“No. I don’t think I saw a living soul.”

He fancied that a look of relief passed across her eyes.

Soon, however, there could be no doubt that there was something between the pair, and other people in the Frau Professor’s house saw them lurking in dark places. The elderly ladies who sat at the head of the table began to discuss what was now a scandal. The Frau Professor was angry and harassed. She had done her best to see nothing. The winter was at hand, and it was not as easy a matter then as in the summer to keep her house full. Herr Sung was a good customer: he had two rooms on the ground floor, and he drank a bottle of Moselle at each meal. The Frau Professor charged him three marks a bottle and made a good profit. None of her other guests drank wine, and some of them did not even drink beer. Neither did she wish to lose Fraulein Cacilie, whose parents were in business in South America and paid well for the Frau Professor’s motherly care; and she knew that if she wrote to the girl’s uncle, who lived in Berlin, he would immediately take her away. The Frau Professor contented herself with giving them both severe looks at table and, though she dared not be rude to the Chinaman, got a certain satisfaction out of incivility to Cacilie. But the three elderly ladies were not content. Two were widows, and one, a Dutchwoman, was a spinster of masculine appearance; they paid the smallest possible sum for their pension, and gave a good deal of trouble, but they were permanent and therefore had to be put up with. They went to the Frau Professor and said that something must be done; it was disgraceful, and the house was ceasing to be respectable. The Frau Professor tried obstinacy, anger, tears, but the three old ladies routed her, and with a sudden assumption of virtuous indignation she said that she would put a stop to the whole thing.

After luncheon she took Cacilie into her bed-room and began to talk very seriously to her; but to her amazement the girl adopted a brazen attitude; she proposed to go about as she liked; and if she chose to walk with the Chinaman she could not see it was anybody’s business but her own. The Frau Professor threatened to write to her uncle.

“Then Onkel Heinrich will put me in a family in Berlin for the winter, and that will be much nicer for me. And Herr Sung will come to Berlin too.”

The Frau Professor began to cry. The tears rolled down her coarse, red, fat cheeks; and Cacilie laughed at her.

“That will mean three rooms empty all through the winter,” she said.

Then the Frau Professor tried another plan. She appealed to Fraulein Cacilie’s better nature: she was kind, sensible, tolerant; she treated her no longer as a child, but as a grown woman. She said that it wouldn’t be so dreadful, but a Chinaman, with his yellow skin and flat nose, and his little pig’s eyes! That’s what made it so horrible. It filled one with disgust to think of it.

“Bitte, bitte,” said Cacilie, with a rapid intake of the breath. “I won’t listen to anything against him.”

“But it’s not serious?” gasped Frau Erlin.

“I love him. I love him. I love him.”

“Gott im Himmel!”

The Frau Professor stared at her with horrified surprise; she had thought it was no more than naughtiness on the child’s part, and innocent, folly. but the passion in her voice revealed everything. Cacilie looked at her for a moment with flaming eyes, and then with a shrug of her shoulders went out of the room.

Frau Erlin kept the details of the interview to herself, and a day or two later altered the arrangement of the table. She asked Herr Sung if he would not come and sit at her end, and he with his unfailing politeness accepted with alacrity. Cacilie took the change indifferently. But as if the discovery that the relations between them were known to the whole household made them more shameless, they made no secret now of their walks together, and every afternoon quite openly set out to wander about the hills. It was plain that they did not care what was said of them. At last even the placidity of Professor Erlin was moved, and he insisted that his wife should speak to the Chinaman. She took him aside in his turn and expostulated; he was ruining the girl’s reputation, he was doing harm to the house, he must see how wrong and wicked his conduct was; but she was met with smiling denials; Herr Sung did not know what she was talking about, he was not paying any attention to Fraulein Cacilie, he never walked with her; it was all untrue, every word of it.

“Ach, Herr Sung, how can you say such things? You’ve been seen again and again.”

“No, you’re mistaken. It’s untrue.”

He looked at her with an unceasing smile, which showed his even, little white teeth. He was quite calm. He denied everything. He denied with bland effrontery. At last the Frau Professor lost her temper and said the girl had confessed she loved him. He was not moved. He continued to smile.

“Nonsense! Nonsense! It’s all untrue.”

She could get nothing out of him. The weather grew very bad; there was snow and frost, and then a thaw with a long succession of cheerless days, on which walking was a poor amusement. One evening when Philip had just finished his German lesson with the Herr Professor and was standing for a moment in the drawing-room, talking to Frau Erlin, Anna came quickly in.

“Mamma, where is Cacilie?” she said.

“I suppose she’s in her room.”

“There’s no light in it.”

The Frau Professor gave an exclamation, and she looked at her daughter in dismay. The thought which was in Anna’s head had flashed across hers.

“Ring for Emil,” she said hoarsely.

This was the stupid lout who waited at table and did most of the housework. He came in.

“Emil, go down to Herr Sung’s room and enter without knocking. If anyone is there say you came in to see about the stove.”

No sign of astonishment appeared on Emil’s phlegmatic face.

He went slowly downstairs. The Frau Professor and Anna left the door open and listened. Presently they heard Emil come up again, and they called him.

“Was anyone there?” asked the Frau Professor.

“Yes, Herr Sung was there.”

“Was he alone?”

The beginning of a cunning smile narrowed his mouth.

“No, Fraulein Cacilie was there.”

“Oh, it’s disgraceful,” cried the Frau Professor.

Now he smiled broadly.

“Fraulein Cacilie is there every evening. She spends hours at a time there.”

Frau Professor began to wring her hands.

“Oh, how abominable! But why didn’t you tell me?”

“It was no business of mine,” he answered, slowly shrugging his shoulders.

“I suppose they paid you well. Go away. Go.”

He lurched clumsily to the door.

“They must go away, mamma,” said Anna.

“And who is going to pay the rent? And the taxes are falling due. It’s all very well for you to say they must go away. If they go away I can’t pay the bills.” She turned to Philip, with tears streaming down her face. “Ach, Herr Carey, you will not say what you have heard. If Fraulein Forster—” this was the Dutch spinster—“if Fraulein Forster knew she would leave at once. And if they all go we must close the house. I cannot afford to keep it.”

“Of course I won’t say anything.”

“If she stays, I will not speak to her,” said Anna.

That evening at supper Fraulein Cacilie, redder than usual, with a look of obstinacy on her face, took her place punctually; but Herr Sung did not appear, and for a while Philip thought he was going to shirk the ordeal. At last he came, very smiling, his little eyes dancing with the apologies he made for his late arrival. He insisted as usual on pouring out the Frau Professor a glass of his Moselle, and he offered a glass to Fraulein Forster. The room was very hot, for the stove had been alight all day and the windows were seldom opened. Emil blundered about, but succeeded somehow in serving everyone quickly and with order. The three old ladies sat in silence, visibly disapproving: the Frau Professor had scarcely recovered from her tears; her husband was silent and oppressed. Conversation languished. It seemed to Philip that there was something dreadful in that gathering which he had sat with so often; they looked different under the light of the two hanging lamps from what they had ever looked before; he was vaguely uneasy. Once he caught Cacilie’s eye, and he thought she looked at him with hatred and contempt. The room was stifling. It was as though the beastly passion of that pair troubled them all; there was a feeling of Oriental depravity; a faint savour of joss-sticks, a mystery of hidden vices, seemed to make their breath heavy. Philip could feel the beating of the arteries in his forehead. He could not understand what strange emotion distracted him; he seemed to feel something infinitely attractive, and yet he was repelled and horrified.

For several days things went on. The air was sickly with the unnatural passion which all felt about them, and the nerves of the little household seemed to grow exasperated. Only Herr Sung remained unaffected; he was no less smiling, affable, and polite than he had been before: one could not tell whether his manner was a triumph of civilisation or an expression of contempt on the part of the Oriental for the vanquished West. Cacilie was flaunting and cynical. At last even the Frau Professor could bear the position no longer. Suddenly panic seized her; for Professor Erlin with brutal frankness had suggested the possible consequences of an intrigue which was now manifest to everyone, and she saw her good name in Heidelberg and the repute of her house ruined by a scandal which could not possibly be hidden. For some reason, blinded perhaps by her interests, this possibility had never occurred to her; and now, her wits muddled by a terrible fear, she could hardly be prevented from turning the girl out of the house at once. It was due to Anna’s good sense that a cautious letter was written to the uncle in Berlin suggesting that Cacilie should be taken away.

But having made up her mind to lose the two lodgers, the Frau Professor could not resist the satisfaction of giving rein to the ill-temper she had curbed so long. She was free now to say anything she liked to Cacilie.

“I have written to your uncle, Cacilie, to take you away. I cannot have you in my house any longer.”

Her little round eyes sparkled when she noticed the sudden whiteness of the girl’s face.

“You’re shameless. Shameless,” she went on.

She called her foul names.

“What did you say to my uncle Heinrich, Frau Professor?” the girl asked, suddenly falling from her attitude of flaunting independence.

“Oh, he’ll tell you himself. I expect to get a letter from him tomorrow.”

Next day, in order to make the humiliation more public, at supper she called down the table to Cacilie.

“I have had a letter from your uncle, Cacilie. You are to pack your things tonight, and we will put you in the train tomorrow morning. He will meet you himself in Berlin at the Central Bahnhof.”

“Very good, Frau Professor.”

Herr Sung smiled in the Frau Professor’s eyes, and notwithstanding her protests insisted on pouring out a glass of wine for her. The Frau Professor ate her supper with a good appetite. But she had triumphed unwisely. Just before going to bed she called the servant.

“Emil, if Fraulein Cacilie’s box is ready you had better take it downstairs tonight. The porter will fetch it before breakfast.”

The servant went away and in a moment came back.

“Fraulein Cacilie is not in her room, and her bag has gone.”

With a cry the Frau Professor hurried along: the box was on the floor, strapped and locked; but there was no bag, and neither hat nor cloak. The dressing-table was empty. Breathing heavily, the Frau Professor ran downstairs to the Chinaman’s rooms, she had not moved so quickly for twenty years, and Emil called out after her to beware she did not fall; she did not trouble to knock, but burst in. The rooms were empty. The luggage had gone, and the door into the garden, still open, showed how it had been got away. In an envelope on the table were notes for the money due on the month’s board and an approximate sum for extras. Groaning, suddenly overcome by her haste, the Frau Professor sank obesely on to a sofa. There could be no doubt. The pair had gone off together. Emil remained stolid and unmoved.

XXXI

Hayward, after saying for a month that he was going South next day and delaying from week to week out of inability to make up his mind to the bother of packing and the tedium of a journey, had at last been driven off just before Christmas by the preparations for that festival. He could not support the thought of a Teutonic merry-making. It gave him goose-flesh to think of the season’s aggressive cheerfulness, and in his desire to avoid the obvious he determined to travel on Christmas Eve.

Philip was not sorry to see him off, for he was a downright person and it irritated him that anybody should not know his own mind. Though much under Hayward’s influence, he would not grant that indecision pointed to a charming sensitiveness; and he resented the shadow of a sneer with which Hayward looked upon his straight ways. They corresponded. Hayward was an admirable letter-writer, and knowing his talent took pains with his letters. His temperament was receptive to the beautiful influences with which he came in contact, and he was able in his letters from Rome to put a subtle fragrance of Italy. He thought the city of the ancient Romans a little vulgar, finding distinction only in the decadence of the Empire; but the Rome of the Popes appealed to his sympathy, and in his chosen words, quite exquisitely, there appeared a rococo beauty. He wrote of old church music and the Alban Hills, and of the languor of incense and the charm of the streets by night, in the rain, when the pavements shone and the light of the street lamps was mysterious. Perhaps he repeated these admirable letters to various friends. He did not know what a troubling effect they had upon Philip; they seemed to make his life very humdrum. With the spring Hayward grew dithyrambic. He proposed that Philip should come down to Italy. He was wasting his time at Heidelberg. The Germans were gross and life there was common; how could the soul come to her own in that prim landscape? In Tuscany the spring was scattering flowers through the land, and Philip was nineteen; let him come and they could wander through the mountain towns of Umbria. Their names sang in Philip’s heart. And Cacilie too, with her lover, had gone to Italy. When he thought of them Philip was seized with a restlessness he could not account for. He cursed his fate because he had no money to travel, and he knew his uncle would not send him more than the fifteen pounds a month which had been agreed upon. He had not managed his allowance very well. His pension and the price of his lessons left him very little over, and he had found going about with Hayward expensive. Hayward had often suggested excursions, a visit to the play, or a bottle of wine, when Philip had come to the end of his month’s money; and with the folly of his age he had been unwilling to confess he could not afford an extravagance.

Luckily Hayward’s letters came seldom, and in the intervals Philip settled down again to his industrious life. He had matriculated at the university and attended one or two courses of lectures. Kuno Fischer was then at the height of his fame and during the winter had been lecturing brilliantly on Schopenhauer. It was Philip’s introduction to philosophy. He had a practical mind and moved uneasily amid the abstract; but he found an unexpected fascination in listening to metaphysical disquisitions; they made him breathless; it was a little like watching a tight-rope dancer doing perilous feats over an abyss; but it was very exciting. The pessimism of the subject attracted his youth; and he believed that the world he was about to enter was a place of pitiless woe and of darkness. That made him none the less eager to enter it; and when, in due course, Mrs. Carey, acting as the correspondent for his guardian’s views, suggested that it was time for him to come back to England, he agreed with enthusiasm. He must make up his mind now what he meant to do. If he left Heidelberg at the end of July they could talk things over during August, and it would be a good time to make arrangements.

The date of his departure was settled, and Mrs. Carey wrote to him again. She reminded him of Miss Wilkinson, through whose kindness he had gone to Frau Erlin’s house at Heidelberg, and told him that she had arranged to spend a few weeks with them at Blackstable. She would be crossing from Flushing on such and such a day, and if he travelled at the same time he could look after her and come on to Blackstable in her company. Philip’s shyness immediately made him write to say that he could not leave till a day or two afterwards. He pictured himself looking out for Miss Wilkinson, the embarrassment of going up to her and asking if it were she (and he might so easily address the wrong person and be snubbed), and then the difficulty of knowing whether in the train he ought to talk to her or whether he could ignore her and read his book.

At last he left Heidelberg. For three months he had been thinking of nothing but the future; and he went without regret. He never knew that he had been happy there. Fraulein Anna gave him a copy of Der Trompeter von Sackingen and in return he presented her with a volume of William Morris. Very wisely neither of them ever read the other’s present.

XXXII

Philip was surprised when he saw his uncle and aunt. He had never noticed before that they were quite old people. The Vicar received him with his usual, not unamiable indifference. He was a little stouter, a little balder, a little grayer. Philip saw how insignificant he was. His face was weak and self-indulgent. Aunt Louisa took him in her arms and kissed him; and tears of happiness flowed down her cheeks. Philip was touched and embarrassed; he had not known with what a hungry love she cared for him.

“Oh, the time has seemed long since you’ve been away, Philip,” she cried.

She stroked his hands and looked into his face with glad eyes.

“You’ve grown. You’re quite a man now.”

There was a very small moustache on his upper lip. He had bought a razor and now and then with infinite care shaved the down off his smooth chin.

“We’ve been so lonely without you.” And then shyly, with a little break in her voice, she asked: “You are glad to come back to your home, aren’t you?”

“Yes, rather.”

She was so thin that she seemed almost transparent, the arms she put round his neck were frail bones that reminded you of chicken bones, and her faded face was oh! so wrinkled. The gray curls which she still wore in the fashion of her youth gave her a queer, pathetic look; and her little withered body was like an autumn leaf, you felt it might be blown away by the first sharp wind. Philip realised that they had done with life, these two quiet little people: they belonged to a past generation, and they were waiting there patiently, rather stupidly, for death; and he, in his vigour and his youth, thirsting for excitement and adventure, was appalled at the waste. They had done nothing, and when they went it would be just as if they had never been. He felt a great pity for Aunt Louisa, and he loved her suddenly because she loved him.

Then Miss Wilkinson, who had kept discreetly out of the way till the Careys had had a chance of welcoming their nephew, came into the room.

“This is Miss Wilkinson, Philip,” said Mrs. Carey.

“The prodigal has returned,” she said, holding out her hand. “I have brought a rose for the prodigal’s buttonhole.”

With a gay smile she pinned to Philip’s coat the flower she had just picked in the garden. He blushed and felt foolish. He knew that Miss Wilkinson was the daughter of his Uncle William’s last rector, and he had a wide acquaintance with the daughters of clergymen. They wore ill-cut clothes and stout boots. They were generally dressed in black, for in Philip’s early years at Blackstable homespuns had not reached East Anglia, and the ladies of the clergy did not favour colours. Their hair was done very untidily, and they smelt aggressively of starched linen. They considered the feminine graces unbecoming and looked the same whether they were old or young. They bore their religion arrogantly. The closeness of their connection with the church made them adopt a slightly dictatorial attitude to the rest of mankind.

Miss Wilkinson was very different. She wore a white muslin gown stamped with gay little bunches of flowers, and pointed, high-heeled shoes, with open-work stockings. To Philip’s inexperience it seemed that she was wonderfully dressed; he did not see that her frock was cheap and showy. Her hair was elaborately dressed, with a neat curl in the middle of the forehead: it was very black, shiny and hard, and it looked as though it could never be in the least disarranged. She had large black eyes and her nose was slightly aquiline; in profile she had somewhat the look of a bird of prey, but full face she was prepossessing. She smiled a great deal, but her mouth was large and when she smiled she tried to hide her teeth, which were big and rather yellow. But what embarrassed Philip most was that she was heavily powdered: he had very strict views on feminine behaviour and did not think a lady ever powdered; but of course Miss Wilkinson was a lady because she was a clergyman’s daughter, and a clergyman was a gentleman.

Philip made up his mind to dislike her thoroughly. She spoke with a slight French accent; and he did not know why she should, since she had been born and bred in the heart of England. He thought her smile affected, and the coy sprightliness of her manner irritated him. For two or three days he remained silent and hostile, but Miss Wilkinson apparently did not notice it. She was very affable. She addressed her conversation almost exclusively to him, and there was something flattering in the way she appealed constantly to his sane judgment. She made him laugh too, and Philip could never resist people who amused him: he had a gift now and then of saying neat things; and it was pleasant to have an appreciative listener. Neither the Vicar nor Mrs. Carey had a sense of humour, and they never laughed at anything he said. As he grew used to Miss Wilkinson, and his shyness left him, he began to like her better; he found the French accent picturesque; and at a garden party which the doctor gave she was very much better dressed than anyone else. She wore a blue foulard with large white spots, and Philip was tickled at the sensation it caused.

“I’m certain they think you’re no better than you should be,” he told her, laughing.

“It’s the dream of my life to be taken for an abandoned hussy,” she answered.

One day when Miss Wilkinson was in her room he asked Aunt Louisa how old she was.

“Oh, my dear, you should never ask a lady’s age; but she’s certainly too old for you to marry.”

The Vicar gave his slow, obese smile.

“She’s no chicken, Louisa,” he said. “She was nearly grown up when we were in Lincolnshire, and that was twenty years ago. She wore a pigtail hanging down her back.”

“She may not have been more than ten,” said Philip.

“She was older than that,” said Aunt Louisa.

“I think she was near twenty,” said the Vicar.

“Oh no, William. Sixteen or seventeen at the outside.”

“That would make her well over thirty,” said Philip.

At that moment Miss Wilkinson tripped downstairs, singing a song by Benjamin Goddard. She had put her hat on, for she and Philip were going for a walk, and she held out her hand for him to button her glove. He did it awkwardly. He felt embarrassed but gallant. Conversation went easily between them now, and as they strolled along they talked of all manner of things. She told Philip about Berlin, and he told her of his year in Heidelberg. As he spoke, things which had appeared of no importance gained a new interest: he described the people at Frau Erlin’s house; and to the conversations between Hayward and Weeks, which at the time seemed so significant, he gave a little twist, so that they looked absurd. He was flattered at Miss Wilkinson’s laughter.

“I’m quite frightened of you,” she said. “You’re so sarcastic.”

Then she asked him playfully whether he had not had any love affairs at Heidelberg. Without thinking, he frankly answered that he had not; but she refused to believe him.

“How secretive you are!” she said. “At your age is it likely?”

He blushed and laughed.

“You want to know too much,” he said.

“Ah, I thought so,” she laughed triumphantly. “Look at him blushing.”

He was pleased that she should think he had been a sad dog, and he changed the conversation so as to make her believe he had all sorts of romantic things to conceal. He was angry with himself that he had not. There had been no opportunity.

Miss Wilkinson was dissatisfied with her lot. She resented having to earn her living and told Philip a long story of an uncle of her mother’s, who had been expected to leave her a fortune but had married his cook and changed his will. She hinted at the luxury of her home and compared her life in Lincolnshire, with horses to ride and carriages to drive in, with the mean dependence of her present state. Philip was a little puzzled when he mentioned this afterwards to Aunt Louisa, and she told him that when she knew the Wilkinsons they had never had anything more than a pony and a dog-cart; Aunt Louisa had heard of the rich uncle, but as he was married and had children before Emily was born she could never have had much hope of inheriting his fortune. Miss Wilkinson had little good to say of Berlin, where she was now in a situation. She complained of the vulgarity of German life, and compared it bitterly with the brilliance of Paris, where she had spent a number of years. She did not say how many. She had been governess in the family of a fashionable portrait-painter, who had married a Jewish wife of means, and in their house she had met many distinguished people. She dazzled Philip with their names. Actors from the Comedie Francaise had come to the house frequently, and Coquelin, sitting next her at dinner, had told her he had never met a foreigner who spoke such perfect French. Alphonse Daudet had come also, and he had given her a copy of Sappho: he had promised to write her name in it, but she had forgotten to remind him. She treasured the volume none the less and she would lend it to Philip. Then there was Maupassant. Miss Wilkinson with a rippling laugh looked at Philip knowingly. What a man, but what a writer! Hayward had talked of Maupassant, and his reputation was not unknown to Philip.

“Did he make love to you?” he asked.

The words seemed to stick funnily in his throat, but he asked them nevertheless. He liked Miss Wilkinson very much now, and was thrilled by her conversation, but he could not imagine anyone making love to her.

“What a question!” she cried. “Poor Guy, he made love to every woman he met. It was a habit that he could not break himself of.”

She sighed a little, and seemed to look back tenderly on the past.

“He was a charming man,” she murmured.

A greater experience than Philip’s would have guessed from these words the probabilities of the encounter: the distinguished writer invited to luncheon en famille, the governess coming in sedately with the two tall girls she was teaching; the introduction:

“Notre Miss Anglaise.”

“Mademoiselle.”

And the luncheon during which the Miss Anglaise sat silent while the distinguished writer talked to his host and hostess.

But to Philip her words called up much more romantic fancies.

“Do tell me all about him,” he said excitedly.

“There’s nothing to tell,” she said truthfully, but in such a manner as to convey that three volumes would scarcely have contained the lurid facts. “You mustn’t be curious.”

She began to talk of Paris. She loved the boulevards and the Bois. There was grace in every street, and the trees in the Champs Elysees had a distinction which trees had not elsewhere. They were sitting on a stile now by the high-road, and Miss Wilkinson looked with disdain upon the stately elms in front of them. And the theatres: the plays were brilliant, and the acting was incomparable. She often went with Madame Foyot, the mother of the girls she was educating, when she was trying on clothes.

“Oh, what a misery to be poor!” she cried. “These beautiful things, it’s only in Paris they know how to dress, and not to be able to afford them! Poor Madame Foyot, she had no figure. Sometimes the dressmaker used to whisper to me: ‘Ah, Mademoiselle, if she only had your figure.’”

Philip noticed then that Miss Wilkinson had a robust form and was proud of it.

“Men are so stupid in England. They only think of the face. The French, who are a nation of lovers, know how much more important the figure is.”

Philip had never thought of such things before, but he observed now that Miss Wilkinson’s ankles were thick and ungainly. He withdrew his eyes quickly.

“You should go to France. Why don’t you go to Paris for a year? You would learn French, and it would—deniaiser you.”

“What is that?” asked Philip.

She laughed slyly.

“You must look it out in the dictionary. Englishmen do not know how to treat women. They are so shy. Shyness is ridiculous in a man. They don’t know how to make love. They can’t even tell a woman she is charming without looking foolish.”

Philip felt himself absurd. Miss Wilkinson evidently expected him to behave very differently; and he would have been delighted to say gallant and witty things, but they never occurred to him; and when they did he was too much afraid of making a fool of himself to say them.

“Oh, I love Paris,” sighed Miss Wilkinson. “But I had to go to Berlin. I was with the Foyots till the girls married, and then I could get nothing to do, and I had the chance of this post in Berlin. They’re relations of Madame Foyot, and I accepted. I had a tiny apartment in the Rue Breda, on the cinquieme: it wasn’t at all respectable. You know about the Rue Breda—ces dames, you know.”

Philip nodded, not knowing at all what she meant, but vaguely suspecting, and anxious she should not think him too ignorant.

“But I didn’t care. Je suis libre, n’est-ce pas?” She was very fond of speaking French, which indeed she spoke well. “Once I had such a curious adventure there.”

She paused a little and Philip pressed her to tell it.

“You wouldn’t tell me yours in Heidelberg,” she said.

“They were so unadventurous,” he retorted.

“I don’t know what Mrs. Carey would say if she knew the sort of things we talk about together.”

“You don’t imagine I shall tell her.”

“Will you promise?”

When he had done this, she told him how an art-student who had a room on the floor above her—but she interrupted herself.

“Why don’t you go in for art? You paint so prettily.”

“Not well enough for that.”

“That is for others to judge. Je m’y connais, and I believe you have the making of a great artist.”

“Can’t you see Uncle William’s face if I suddenly told him I wanted to go to Paris and study art?”

“You’re your own master, aren’t you?”

“You’re trying to put me off. Please go on with the story.” Miss Wilkinson, with a little laugh, went on. The art-student had passed her several times on the stairs, and she had paid no particular attention. She saw that he had fine eyes, and he took off his hat very politely. And one day she found a letter slipped under her door. It was from him. He told her that he had adored her for months, and that he waited about the stairs for her to pass. Oh, it was a charming letter! Of course she did not reply, but what woman could help being flattered? And next day there was another letter! It was wonderful, passionate, and touching. When next she met him on the stairs she did not know which way to look. And every day the letters came, and now he begged her to see him. He said he would come in the evening, vers neuf heures, and she did not know what to do. Of course it was impossible, and he might ring and ring, but she would never open the door; and then while she was waiting for the tinkling of the bell, all nerves, suddenly he stood before her. She had forgotten to shut the door when she came in.

“C’etait une fatalite.”

“And what happened then?” asked Philip.

“That is the end of the story,” she replied, with a ripple of laughter.

Philip was silent for a moment. His heart beat quickly, and strange emotions seemed to be hustling one another in his heart. He saw the dark staircase and the chance meetings, and he admired the boldness of the letters—oh, he would never have dared to do that—and then the silent, almost mysterious entrance. It seemed to him the very soul of romance.

“What was he like?”

“Oh, he was handsome. Charmant garcon.”

“Do you know him still?”

Philip felt a slight feeling of irritation as he asked this.

“He treated me abominably. Men are always the same. You’re heartless, all of you.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Philip, not without embarrassment.

“Let us go home,” said Miss Wilkinson.

XXXIII

Philip could not get Miss Wilkinson’s story out of his head. It was clear enough what she meant even though she cut it short, and he was a little shocked. That sort of thing was all very well for married women, he had read enough French novels to know that in France it was indeed the rule, but Miss Wilkinson was English and unmarried; her father was a clergyman. Then it struck him that the art-student probably was neither the first nor the last of her lovers, and he gasped: he had never looked upon Miss Wilkinson like that; it seemed incredible that anyone should make love to her. In his ingenuousness he doubted her story as little as he doubted what he read in books, and he was angry that such wonderful things never happened to him. It was humiliating that if Miss Wilkinson insisted upon his telling her of his adventures in Heidelberg he would have nothing to tell. It was true that he had some power of invention, but he was not sure whether he could persuade her that he was steeped in vice; women were full of intuition, he had read that, and she might easily discover that he was fibbing. He blushed scarlet as he thought of her laughing up her sleeve.

Miss Wilkinson played the piano and sang in a rather tired voice; but her songs, Massenet, Benjamin Goddard, and Augusta Holmes, were new to Philip; and together they spent many hours at the piano. One day she wondered if he had a voice and insisted on trying it. She told him he had a pleasant baritone and offered to give him lessons. At first with his usual bashfulness he refused, but she insisted, and then every morning at a convenient time after breakfast she gave him an hour’s lesson. She had a natural gift for teaching, and it was clear that she was an excellent governess. She had method and firmness. Though her French accent was so much part of her that it remained, all the mellifluousness of her manner left her when she was engaged in teaching. She put up with no nonsense. Her voice became a little peremptory, and instinctively she suppressed inattention and corrected slovenliness. She knew what she was about and put Philip to scales and exercises.

When the lesson was over she resumed without effort her seductive smiles, her voice became again soft and winning, but Philip could not so easily put away the pupil as she the pedagogue; and this impression convicted with the feelings her stories had aroused in him. He looked at her more narrowly. He liked her much better in the evening than in the morning. In the morning she was rather lined and the skin of her neck was just a little rough. He wished she would hide it, but the weather was very warm just then and she wore blouses which were cut low. She was very fond of white; in the morning it did not suit her. At night she often looked very attractive, she put on a gown which was almost a dinner dress, and she wore a chain of garnets round her neck; the lace about her bosom and at her elbows gave her a pleasant softness, and the scent she wore (at Blackstable no one used anything but Eau de Cologne, and that only on Sundays or when suffering from a sick headache) was troubling and exotic. She really looked very young then.

Philip was much exercised over her age. He added twenty and seventeen together, and could not bring them to a satisfactory total. He asked Aunt Louisa more than once why she thought Miss Wilkinson was thirty-seven: she didn’t look more than thirty, and everyone knew that foreigners aged more rapidly than English women; Miss Wilkinson had lived so long abroad that she might almost be called a foreigner. He personally wouldn’t have thought her more than twenty-six.

“She’s more than that,” said Aunt Louisa.

Philip did not believe in the accuracy of the Careys’ statements. All they distinctly remembered was that Miss Wilkinson had not got her hair up the last time they saw her in Lincolnshire. Well, she might have been twelve then: it was so long ago and the Vicar was always so unreliable. They said it was twenty years ago, but people used round figures, and it was just as likely to be eighteen years, or seventeen. Seventeen and twelve were only twenty-nine, and hang it all, that wasn’t old, was it? Cleopatra was forty-eight when Antony threw away the world for her sake.

It was a fine summer. Day after day was hot and cloudless; but the heat was tempered by the neighbourhood of the sea, and there was a pleasant exhilaration in the air, so that one was excited and not oppressed by the August sunshine. There was a pond in the garden in which a fountain played; water lilies grew in it and gold fish sunned themselves on the surface. Philip and Miss Wilkinson used to take rugs and cushions there after dinner and lie on the lawn in the shade of a tall hedge of roses. They talked and read all the afternoon. They smoked cigarettes, which the Vicar did not allow in the house; he thought smoking a disgusting habit, and used frequently to say that it was disgraceful for anyone to grow a slave to a habit. He forgot that he was himself a slave to afternoon tea.

One day Miss Wilkinson gave Philip La Vie de Boheme. She had found it by accident when she was rummaging among the books in the Vicar’s study. It had been bought in a lot with something Mr. Carey wanted and had remained undiscovered for ten years.

Philip began to read Murger’s fascinating, ill-written, absurd masterpiece, and fell at once under its spell. His soul danced with joy at that picture of starvation which is so good-humoured, of squalor which is so picturesque, of sordid love which is so romantic, of bathos which is so moving. Rodolphe and Mimi, Musette and Schaunard! They wander through the gray streets of the Latin Quarter, finding refuge now in one attic, now in another, in their quaint costumes of Louis Philippe, with their tears and their smiles, happy-go-lucky and reckless. Who can resist them? It is only when you return to the book with a sounder judgment that you find how gross their pleasures were, how vulgar their minds; and you feel the utter worthlessness, as artists and as human beings, of that gay procession. Philip was enraptured.

“Don’t you wish you were going to Paris instead of London?” asked Miss Wilkinson, smiling at his enthusiasm.

“It’s too late now even if I did,” he answered.

During the fortnight he had been back from Germany there had been much discussion between himself and his uncle about his future. He had refused definitely to go to Oxford, and now that there was no chance of his getting scholarships even Mr. Carey came to the conclusion that he could not afford it. His entire fortune had consisted of only two thousand pounds, and though it had been invested in mortgages at five per cent, he had not been able to live on the interest. It was now a little reduced. It would be absurd to spend two hundred a year, the least he could live on at a university, for three years at Oxford which would lead him no nearer to earning his living. He was anxious to go straight to London. Mrs. Carey thought there were only four professions for a gentleman, the Army, the Navy, the Law, and the Church. She had added medicine because her brother-in-law practised it, but did not forget that in her young days no one ever considered the doctor a gentleman. The first two were out of the question, and Philip was firm in his refusal to be ordained. Only the law remained. The local doctor had suggested that many gentlemen now went in for engineering, but Mrs. Carey opposed the idea at once.

“I shouldn’t like Philip to go into trade,” she said.

“No, he must have a profession,” answered the Vicar.

“Why not make him a doctor like his father?”

“I should hate it,” said Philip.

Mrs. Carey was not sorry. The Bar seemed out of the question, since he was not going to Oxford, for the Careys were under the impression that a degree was still necessary for success in that calling; and finally it was suggested that he should become articled to a solicitor. They wrote to the family lawyer, Albert Nixon, who was co-executor with the Vicar of Blackstable for the late Henry Carey’s estate, and asked him whether he would take Philip. In a day or two the answer came back that he had not a vacancy, and was very much opposed to the whole scheme; the profession was greatly overcrowded, and without capital or connections a man had small chance of becoming more than a managing clerk; he suggested, however, that Philip should become a chartered accountant. Neither the Vicar nor his wife knew in the least what this was, and Philip had never heard of anyone being a chartered accountant; but another letter from the solicitor explained that the growth of modern businesses and the increase of companies had led to the formation of many firms of accountants to examine the books and put into the financial affairs of their clients an order which old-fashioned methods had lacked. Some years before a Royal Charter had been obtained, and the profession was becoming every year more respectable, lucrative, and important. The chartered accountants whom Albert Nixon had employed for thirty years happened to have a vacancy for an articled pupil, and would take Philip for a fee of three hundred pounds. Half of this would be returned during the five years the articles lasted in the form of salary. The prospect was not exciting, but Philip felt that he must decide on something, and the thought of living in London over-balanced the slight shrinking he felt. The Vicar of Blackstable wrote to ask Mr. Nixon whether it was a profession suited to a gentleman; and Mr. Nixon replied that, since the Charter, men were going into it who had been to public schools and a university; moreover, if Philip disliked the work and after a year wished to leave, Herbert Carter, for that was the accountant’s name, would return half the money paid for the articles. This settled it, and it was arranged that Philip should start work on the fifteenth of September.

“I have a full month before me,” said Philip.

“And then you go to freedom and I to bondage,” returned Miss Wilkinson.

Her holidays were to last six weeks, and she would be leaving Blackstable only a day or two before Philip.

“I wonder if we shall ever meet again,” she said.

“I don’t know why not.”

“Oh, don’t speak in that practical way. I never knew anyone so unsentimental.”

Philip reddened. He was afraid that Miss Wilkinson would think him a milksop: after all she was a young woman, sometimes quite pretty, and he was getting on for twenty; it was absurd that they should talk of nothing but art and literature. He ought to make love to her. They had talked a good deal of love. There was the art-student in the Rue Breda, and then there was the painter in whose family she had lived so long in Paris: he had asked her to sit for him, and had started to make love to her so violently that she was forced to invent excuses not to sit to him again. It was clear enough that Miss Wilkinson was used to attentions of that sort. She looked very nice now in a large straw hat: it was hot that afternoon, the hottest day they had had, and beads of sweat stood in a line on her upper lip. He called to mind Fraulein Cacilie and Herr Sung. He had never thought of Cacilie in an amorous way, she was exceedingly plain; but now, looking back, the affair seemed very romantic. He had a chance of romance too. Miss Wilkinson was practically French, and that added zest to a possible adventure. When he thought of it at night in bed, or when he sat by himself in the garden reading a book, he was thrilled by it; but when he saw Miss Wilkinson it seemed less picturesque.

At all events, after what she had told him, she would not be surprised if he made love to her. He had a feeling that she must think it odd of him to make no sign: perhaps it was only his fancy, but once or twice in the last day or two he had imagined that there was a suspicion of contempt in her eyes.

“A penny for your thoughts,” said Miss Wilkinson, looking at him with a smile.

“I’m not going to tell you,” he answered.

He was thinking that he ought to kiss her there and then. He wondered if she expected him to do it; but after all he didn’t see how he could without any preliminary business at all. She would just think him mad, or she might slap his face; and perhaps she would complain to his uncle. He wondered how Herr Sung had started with Fraulein Cacilie. It would be beastly if she told his uncle: he knew what his uncle was, he would tell the doctor and Josiah Graves; and he would look a perfect fool. Aunt Louisa kept on saying that Miss Wilkinson was thirty-seven if she was a day; he shuddered at the thought of the ridicule he would be exposed to; they would say she was old enough to be his mother.

“Twopence for your thoughts,” smiled Miss Wilkinson.

“I was thinking about you,” he answered boldly.

That at all events committed him to nothing.

“What were you thinking?”

“Ah, now you want to know too much.”

“Naughty boy!” said Miss Wilkinson.

There it was again! Whenever he had succeeded in working himself up she said something which reminded him of the governess. She called him playfully a naughty boy when he did not sing his exercises to her satisfaction. This time he grew quite sulky.

“I wish you wouldn’t treat me as if I were a child.”

“Are you cross?”

“Very.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

She put out her hand and he took it. Once or twice lately when they shook hands at night he had fancied she slightly pressed his hand, but this time there was no doubt about it.

He did not quite know what he ought to say next. Here at last was his chance of an adventure, and he would be a fool not to take it; but it was a little ordinary, and he had expected more glamour. He had read many descriptions of love, and he felt in himself none of that uprush of emotion which novelists described; he was not carried off his feet in wave upon wave of passion; nor was Miss Wilkinson the ideal: he had often pictured to himself the great violet eyes and the alabaster skin of some lovely girl, and he had thought of himself burying his face in the rippling masses of her auburn hair. He could not imagine himself burying his face in Miss Wilkinson’s hair, it always struck him as a little sticky. All the same it would be very satisfactory to have an intrigue, and he thrilled with the legitimate pride he would enjoy in his conquest. He owed it to himself to seduce her. He made up his mind to kiss Miss Wilkinson; not then, but in the evening; it would be easier in the dark, and after he had kissed her the rest would follow. He would kiss her that very evening. He swore an oath to that effect.

He laid his plans. After supper he suggested that they should take a stroll in the garden. Miss Wilkinson accepted, and they sauntered side by side. Philip was very nervous. He did not know why, but the conversation would not lead in the right direction; he had decided that the first thing to do was to put his arm round her waist; but he could not suddenly put his arm round her waist when she was talking of the regatta which was to be held next week. He led her artfully into the darkest parts of the garden, but having arrived there his courage failed him. They sat on a bench, and he had really made up his mind that here was his opportunity when Miss Wilkinson said she was sure there were earwigs and insisted on moving. They walked round the garden once more, and Philip promised himself he would take the plunge before they arrived at that bench again; but as they passed the house, they saw Mrs. Carey standing at the door.

“Hadn’t you young people better come in? I’m sure the night air isn’t good for you.”

“Perhaps we had better go in,” said Philip. “I don’t want you to catch cold.”

He said it with a sigh of relief. He could attempt nothing more that night. But afterwards, when he was alone in his room, he was furious with himself. He had been a perfect fool. He was certain that Miss Wilkinson expected him to kiss her, otherwise she wouldn’t have come into the garden. She was always saying that only Frenchmen knew how to treat women. Philip had read French novels. If he had been a Frenchman he would have seized her in his arms and told her passionately that he adored her; he would have pressed his lips on her nuque. He did not know why Frenchmen always kissed ladies on the nuque. He did not himself see anything so very attractive in the nape of the neck. Of course it was much easier for Frenchmen to do these things; the language was such an aid; Philip could never help feeling that to say passionate things in English sounded a little absurd. He wished now that he had never undertaken the siege of Miss Wilkinson’s virtue; the first fortnight had been so jolly, and now he was wretched; but he was determined not to give in, he would never respect himself again if he did, and he made up his mind irrevocably that the next night he would kiss her without fail.

Next day when he got up he saw it was raining, and his first thought was that they would not be able to go into the garden that evening. He was in high spirits at breakfast. Miss Wilkinson sent Mary Ann in to say that she had a headache and would remain in bed. She did not come down till tea-time, when she appeared in a becoming wrapper and a pale face; but she was quite recovered by supper, and the meal was very cheerful. After prayers she said she would go straight to bed, and she kissed Mrs. Carey. Then she turned to Philip.

“Good gracious!” she cried. “I was just going to kiss you too.”

“Why don’t you?” he said.

She laughed and held out her hand. She distinctly pressed his.

The following day there was not a cloud in the sky, and the garden was sweet and fresh after the rain. Philip went down to the beach to bathe and when he came home ate a magnificent dinner. They were having a tennis party at the vicarage in the afternoon and Miss Wilkinson put on her best dress. She certainly knew how to wear her clothes, and Philip could not help noticing how elegant she looked beside the curate’s wife and the doctor’s married daughter. There were two roses in her waistband. She sat in a garden chair by the side of the lawn, holding a red parasol over herself, and the light on her face was very becoming. Philip was fond of tennis. He served well and as he ran clumsily played close to the net: notwithstanding his club-foot he was quick, and it was difficult to get a ball past him. He was pleased because he won all his sets. At tea he lay down at Miss Wilkinson’s feet, hot and panting.

“Flannels suit you,” she said. “You look very nice this afternoon.”

He blushed with delight.

“I can honestly return the compliment. You look perfectly ravishing.”

She smiled and gave him a long look with her black eyes.

After supper he insisted that she should come out.

“Haven’t you had enough exercise for one day?”

“It’ll be lovely in the garden tonight. The stars are all out.”

He was in high spirits.

“D’you know, Mrs. Carey has been scolding me on your account?” said Miss Wilkinson, when they were sauntering through the kitchen garden. “She says I mustn’t flirt with you.”

“Have you been flirting with me? I hadn’t noticed it.”

“She was only joking.”

“It was very unkind of you to refuse to kiss me last night.”

“If you saw the look your uncle gave me when I said what I did!”

“Was that all that prevented you?”

“I prefer to kiss people without witnesses.”

“There are no witnesses now.”

Philip put his arm round her waist and kissed her lips. She only laughed a little and made no attempt to withdraw. It had come quite naturally. Philip was very proud of himself. He said he would, and he had. It was the easiest thing in the world. He wished he had done it before. He did it again.

“Oh, you mustn’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because I like it,” she laughed.

XXXIV

Next day after dinner they took their rugs and cushions to the fountain, and their books; but they did not read. Miss Wilkinson made herself comfortable and she opened the red sun-shade. Philip was not at all shy now, but at first she would not let him kiss her.

“It was very wrong of me last night,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep, I felt I’d done so wrong.”

“What nonsense!” he cried. “I’m sure you slept like a top.”

“What do you think your uncle would say if he knew?”

“There’s no reason why he should know.”

He leaned over her, and his heart went pit-a-pat.

“Why d’you want to kiss me?”

He knew he ought to reply: “Because I love you.” But he could not bring himself to say it.

“Why do you think?” he asked instead.

She looked at him with smiling eyes and touched his face with the tips of her fingers.

“How smooth your face is,” she murmured.

“I want shaving awfully,” he said.

It was astonishing how difficult he found it to make romantic speeches. He found that silence helped him much more than words. He could look inexpressible things. Miss Wilkinson sighed.

“Do you like me at all?”

“Yes, awfully.”

When he tried to kiss her again she did not resist. He pretended to be much more passionate than he really was, and he succeeded in playing a part which looked very well in his own eyes.

“I’m beginning to be rather frightened of you,” said Miss Wilkinson.

“You’ll come out after supper, won’t you?” he begged.

“Not unless you promise to behave yourself.”

“I’ll promise anything.”

He was catching fire from the flame he was partly simulating, and at tea-time he was obstreperously merry. Miss Wilkinson looked at him nervously.

“You mustn’t have those shining eyes,” she said to him afterwards. “What will your Aunt Louisa think?”

“I don’t care what she thinks.”

Miss Wilkinson gave a little laugh of pleasure. They had no sooner finished supper than he said to her:

“Are you going to keep me company while I smoke a cigarette?”

“Why don’t you let Miss Wilkinson rest?” said Mrs. Carey. “You must remember she’s not as young as you.”

“Oh, I’d like to go out, Mrs. Carey,” she said, rather acidly.

“After dinner walk a mile, after supper rest a while,” said the Vicar.

“Your aunt is very nice, but she gets on my nerves sometimes,” said Miss Wilkinson, as soon as they closed the side-door behind them.

Philip threw away the cigarette he had just lighted, and flung his arms round her. She tried to push him away.

“You promised you’d be good, Philip.”

“You didn’t think I was going to keep a promise like that?”

“Not so near the house, Philip,” she said. “Supposing someone should come out suddenly?”

He led her to the kitchen garden where no one was likely to come, and this time Miss Wilkinson did not think of earwigs. He kissed her passionately. It was one of the things that puzzled him that he did not like her at all in the morning, and only moderately in the afternoon, but at night the touch of her hand thrilled him. He said things that he would never have thought himself capable of saying; he could certainly never have said them in the broad light of day; and he listened to himself with wonder and satisfaction.

“How beautifully you make love,” she said.

That was what he thought himself.

“Oh, if I could only say all the things that burn my heart!” he murmured passionately.

It was splendid. It was the most thrilling game he had ever played; and the wonderful thing was that he felt almost all he said. It was only that he exaggerated a little. He was tremendously interested and excited in the effect he could see it had on her. It was obviously with an effort that at last she suggested going in.

“Oh, don’t go yet,” he cried.

“I must,” she muttered. “I’m frightened.”

He had a sudden intuition what was the right thing to do then.

“I can’t go in yet. I shall stay here and think. My cheeks are burning. I want the night-air. Good-night.”

He held out his hand seriously, and she took it in silence. He thought she stifled a sob. Oh, it was magnificent! When, after a decent interval during which he had been rather bored in the dark garden by himself, he went in he found that Miss Wilkinson had already gone to bed.

After that things were different between them. The next day and the day after Philip showed himself an eager lover. He was deliciously flattered to discover that Miss Wilkinson was in love with him: she told him so in English, and she told him so in French. She paid him compliments. No one had ever informed him before that his eyes were charming and that he had a sensual mouth. He had never bothered much about his personal appearance, but now, when occasion presented, he looked at himself in the glass with satisfaction. When he kissed her it was wonderful to feel the passion that seemed to thrill her soul. He kissed her a good deal, for he found it easier to do that than to say the things he instinctively felt she expected of him. It still made him feel a fool to say he worshipped her. He wished there were someone to whom he could boast a little, and he would willingly have discussed minute points of his conduct. Sometimes she said things that were enigmatic, and he was puzzled. He wished Hayward had been there so that he could ask him what he thought she meant, and what he had better do next. He could not make up his mind whether he ought to rush things or let them take their time. There were only three weeks more.

“I can’t bear to think of that,” she said. “It breaks my heart. And then perhaps we shall never see one another again.”

“If you cared for me at all, you wouldn’t be so unkind to me,” he whispered.

“Oh, why can’t you be content to let it go on as it is? Men are always the same. They’re never satisfied.”

And when he pressed her, she said:

“But don’t you see it’s impossible. How can we here?”

He proposed all sorts of schemes, but she would not have anything to do with them.

“I daren’t take the risk. It would be too dreadful if your aunt found out.”

A day or two later he had an idea which seemed brilliant.

“Look here, if you had a headache on Sunday evening and offered to stay at home and look after the house, Aunt Louisa would go to church.”

Generally Mrs. Carey remained in on Sunday evening in order to allow Mary Ann to go to church, but she would welcome the opportunity of attending evensong.

Philip had not found it necessary to impart to his relations the change in his views on Christianity which had occurred in Germany; they could not be expected to understand; and it seemed less trouble to go to church quietly. But he only went in the morning. He regarded this as a graceful concession to the prejudices of society and his refusal to go a second time as an adequate assertion of free thought.

When he made the suggestion, Miss Wilkinson did not speak for a moment, then shook her head.

“No, I won’t,” she said.

But on Sunday at tea-time she surprised Philip. “I don’t think I’ll come to church this evening,” she said suddenly. “I’ve really got a dreadful headache.”

Mrs. Carey, much concerned, insisted on giving her some ‘drops’ which she was herself in the habit of using. Miss Wilkinson thanked her, and immediately after tea announced that she would go to her room and lie down.

“Are you sure there’s nothing you’ll want?” asked Mrs. Carey anxiously.

“Quite sure, thank you.”

“Because, if there isn’t, I think I’ll go to church. I don’t often have the chance of going in the evening.”

“Oh yes, do go.”

“I shall be in,” said Philip. “If Miss Wilkinson wants anything, she can always call me.”

“You’d better leave the drawing-room door open, Philip, so that if Miss Wilkinson rings, you’ll hear.”

“Certainly,” said Philip.

So after six o’clock Philip was left alone in the house with Miss Wilkinson. He felt sick with apprehension. He wished with all his heart that he had not suggested the plan; but it was too late now; he must take the opportunity which he had made. What would Miss Wilkinson think of him if he did not! He went into the hall and listened. There was not a sound. He wondered if Miss Wilkinson really had a headache. Perhaps she had forgotten his suggestion. His heart beat painfully. He crept up the stairs as softly as he could, and he stopped with a start when they creaked. He stood outside Miss Wilkinson’s room and listened; he put his hand on the knob of the door-handle. He waited. It seemed to him that he waited for at least five minutes, trying to make up his mind; and his hand trembled. He would willingly have bolted, but he was afraid of the remorse which he knew would seize him. It was like getting on the highest diving-board in a swimming-bath; it looked nothing from below, but when you got up there and stared down at the water your heart sank; and the only thing that forced you to dive was the shame of coming down meekly by the steps you had climbed up. Philip screwed up his courage. He turned the handle softly and walked in. He seemed to himself to be trembling like a leaf.

Miss Wilkinson was standing at the dressing-table with her back to the door, and she turned round quickly when she heard it open.

“Oh, it’s you. What d’you want?”

She had taken off her skirt and blouse, and was standing in her petticoat. It was short and only came down to the top of her boots; the upper part of it was black, of some shiny material, and there was a red flounce. She wore a camisole of white calico with short arms. She looked grotesque. Philip’s heart sank as he stared at her; she had never seemed so unattractive; but it was too late now. He closed the door behind him and locked it.

XXXV

Philip woke early next morning. His sleep had been restless; but when he stretched his legs and looked at the sunshine that slid through the Venetian blinds, making patterns on the floor, he sighed with satisfaction. He was delighted with himself. He began to think of Miss Wilkinson. She had asked him to call her Emily, but, he knew not why, he could not; he always thought of her as Miss Wilkinson. Since she chid him for so addressing her, he avoided using her name at all. During his childhood he had often heard a sister of Aunt Louisa, the widow of a naval officer, spoken of as Aunt Emily. It made him uncomfortable to call Miss Wilkinson by that name, nor could he think of any that would have suited her better. She had begun as Miss Wilkinson, and it seemed inseparable from his impression of her. He frowned a little: somehow or other he saw her now at her worst; he could not forget his dismay when she turned round and he saw her in her camisole and the short petticoat; he remembered the slight roughness of her skin and the sharp, long lines on the side of the neck. His triumph was short-lived. He reckoned out her age again, and he did not see how she could be less than forty. It made the affair ridiculous. She was plain and old. His quick fancy showed her to him, wrinkled, haggard, made-up, in those frocks which were too showy for her position and too young for her years. He shuddered; he felt suddenly that he never wanted to see her again; he could not bear the thought of kissing her. He was horrified with himself. Was that love?

He took as long as he could over dressing in order to put back the moment of seeing her, and when at last he went into the dining-room it was with a sinking heart. Prayers were over, and they were sitting down at breakfast.

“Lazybones,” Miss Wilkinson cried gaily.

He looked at her and gave a little gasp of relief. She was sitting with her back to the window. She was really quite nice. He wondered why he had thought such things about her. His self-satisfaction returned to him.

He was taken aback by the change in her. She told him in a voice thrilling with emotion immediately after breakfast that she loved him; and when a little later they went into the drawing-room for his singing lesson and she sat down on the music-stool she put up her face in the middle of a scale and said:

“Embrasse-moi.”

When he bent down she flung her arms round his neck. It was slightly uncomfortable, for she held him in such a position that he felt rather choked.

“Ah, je t’aime. Je t’aime. Je t’aime,” she cried, with her extravagantly French accent.

Philip wished she would speak English.

“I say, I don’t know if it’s struck you that the gardener’s quite likely to pass the window any minute.”

“Ah, je m’en fiche du jardinier. Je m’en refiche, et je m’en contrefiche.”

Philip thought it was very like a French novel, and he did not know why it slightly irritated him.

At last he said:

“Well, I think I’ll tootle along to the beach and have a dip.”

“Oh, you’re not going to leave me this morning—of all mornings?” Philip did not quite know why he should not, but it did not matter.

“Would you like me to stay?” he smiled.

“Oh, you darling! But no, go. Go. I want to think of you mastering the salt sea waves, bathing your limbs in the broad ocean.”

He got his hat and sauntered off.

“What rot women talk!” he thought to himself.

But he was pleased and happy and flattered. She was evidently frightfully gone on him. As he limped along the high street of Blackstable he looked with a tinge of superciliousness at the people he passed. He knew a good many to nod to, and as he gave them a smile of recognition he thought to himself, if they only knew! He did want someone to know very badly. He thought he would write to Hayward, and in his mind composed the letter. He would talk of the garden and the roses, and the little French governess, like an exotic flower amongst them, scented and perverse: he would say she was French, because—well, she had lived in France so long that she almost was, and besides it would be shabby to give the whole thing away too exactly, don’t you know; and he would tell Hayward how he had seen her first in her pretty muslin dress and of the flower she had given him. He made a delicate idyl of it: the sunshine and the sea gave it passion and magic, and the stars added poetry, and the old vicarage garden was a fit and exquisite setting. There was something Meredithian about it: it was not quite Lucy Feverel and not quite Clara Middleton; but it was inexpressibly charming. Philip’s heart beat quickly. He was so delighted with his fancies that he began thinking of them again as soon as he crawled back, dripping and cold, into his bathing-machine. He thought of the object of his affections. She had the most adorable little nose and large brown eyes—he would describe her to Hayward—and masses of soft brown hair, the sort of hair it was delicious to bury your face in, and a skin which was like ivory and sunshine, and her cheek was like a red, red rose. How old was she? Eighteen perhaps, and he called her Musette. Her laughter was like a rippling brook, and her voice was so soft, so low, it was the sweetest music he had ever heard.

“What ARE you thinking about?”

Philip stopped suddenly. He was walking slowly home.

“I’ve been waving at you for the last quarter of a mile. You ARE absent-minded.”

Miss Wilkinson was standing in front of him, laughing at his surprise.

“I thought I’d come and meet you.”

“That’s awfully nice of you,” he said.

“Did I startle you?”

“You did a bit,” he admitted.

He wrote his letter to Hayward all the same. There were eight pages of it.

The fortnight that remained passed quickly, and though each evening, when they went into the garden after supper, Miss Wilkinson remarked that one day more had gone, Philip was in too cheerful spirits to let the thought depress him. One night Miss Wilkinson suggested that it would be delightful if she could exchange her situation in Berlin for one in London. Then they could see one another constantly. Philip said it would be very jolly, but the prospect aroused no enthusiasm in him; he was looking forward to a wonderful life in London, and he preferred not to be hampered. He spoke a little too freely of all he meant to do, and allowed Miss Wilkinson to see that already he was longing to be off.

“You wouldn’t talk like that if you loved me,” she cried.

He was taken aback and remained silent.

“What a fool I’ve been,” she muttered.

To his surprise he saw that she was crying. He had a tender heart, and hated to see anyone miserable.

“Oh, I’m awfully sorry. What have I done? Don’t cry.”

“Oh, Philip, don’t leave me. You don’t know what you mean to me. I have such a wretched life, and you’ve made me so happy.”

He kissed her silently. There really was anguish in her tone, and he was frightened. It had never occurred to him that she meant what she said quite, quite seriously.

“I’m awfully sorry. You know I’m frightfully fond of you. I wish you would come to London.”

“You know I can’t. Places are almost impossible to get, and I hate English life.”

Almost unconscious that he was acting a part, moved by her distress, he pressed her more and more. Her tears vaguely flattered him, and he kissed her with real passion.

But a day or two later she made a real scene. There was a tennis-party at the vicarage, and two girls came, daughters of a retired major in an Indian regiment who had lately settled in Blackstable. They were very pretty, one was Philip’s age and the other was a year or two younger. Being used to the society of young men (they were full of stories of hill-stations in India, and at that time the stories of Rudyard Kipling were in every hand) they began to chaff Philip gaily; and he, pleased with the novelty—the young ladies at Blackstable treated the Vicar’s nephew with a certain seriousness—was gay and jolly. Some devil within him prompted him to start a violent flirtation with them both, and as he was the only young man there, they were quite willing to meet him half-way. It happened that they played tennis quite well and Philip was tired of pat-ball with Miss Wilkinson (she had only begun to play when she came to Blackstable), so when he arranged the sets after tea he suggested that Miss Wilkinson should play against the curate’s wife, with the curate as her partner; and he would play later with the new-comers. He sat down by the elder Miss O’Connor and said to her in an undertone:

“We’ll get the duffers out of the way first, and then we’ll have a jolly set afterwards.”

Apparently Miss Wilkinson overheard him, for she threw down her racket, and, saying she had a headache, went away. It was plain to everyone that she was offended. Philip was annoyed that she should make the fact public. The set was arranged without her, but presently Mrs. Carey called him.

“Philip, you’ve hurt Emily’s feelings. She’s gone to her room and she’s crying.”

“What about?”

“Oh, something about a duffer’s set. Do go to her, and say you didn’t mean to be unkind, there’s a good boy.”

“All right.”

He knocked at Miss Wilkinson’s door, but receiving no answer went in. He found her lying face downwards on her bed, weeping. He touched her on the shoulder.

“I say, what on earth’s the matter?”

“Leave me alone. I never want to speak to you again.”

“What have I done? I’m awfully sorry if I’ve hurt your feelings. I didn’t mean to. I say, do get up.”

“Oh, I’m so unhappy. How could you be cruel to me? You know I hate that stupid game. I only play because I want to play with you.”

She got up and walked towards the dressing-table, but after a quick look in the glass sank into a chair. She made her handkerchief into a ball and dabbed her eyes with it.

“I’ve given you the greatest thing a woman can give a man—oh, what a fool I was—and you have no gratitude. You must be quite heartless. How could you be so cruel as to torment me by flirting with those vulgar girls. We’ve only got just over a week. Can’t you even give me that?”

Philip stood over her rather sulkily. He thought her behaviour childish. He was vexed with her for having shown her ill-temper before strangers.

“But you know I don’t care twopence about either of the O’Connors. Why on earth should you think I do?”

Miss Wilkinson put away her handkerchief. Her tears had made marks on her powdered face, and her hair was somewhat disarranged. Her white dress did not suit her very well just then. She looked at Philip with hungry, passionate eyes.

“Because you’re twenty and so’s she,” she said hoarsely. “And I’m old.”

Philip reddened and looked away. The anguish of her tone made him feel strangely uneasy. He wished with all his heart that he had never had anything to do with Miss Wilkinson.

“I don’t want to make you unhappy,” he said awkwardly. “You’d better go down and look after your friends. They’ll wonder what has become of you.”

“All right.”

He was glad to leave her.

The quarrel was quickly followed by a reconciliation, but the few days that remained were sometimes irksome to Philip. He wanted to talk of nothing but the future, and the future invariably reduced Miss Wilkinson to tears. At first her weeping affected him, and feeling himself a beast he redoubled his protestations of undying passion; but now it irritated him: it would have been all very well if she had been a girl, but it was silly of a grown-up woman to cry so much. She never ceased reminding him that he was under a debt of gratitude to her which he could never repay. He was willing to acknowledge this since she made a point of it, but he did not really know why he should be any more grateful to her than she to him. He was expected to show his sense of obligation in ways which were rather a nuisance: he had been a good deal used to solitude, and it was a necessity to him sometimes; but Miss Wilkinson looked upon it as an unkindness if he was not always at her beck and call. The Miss O’Connors asked them both to tea, and Philip would have liked to go, but Miss Wilkinson said she only had five days more and wanted him entirely to herself. It was flattering, but a bore. Miss Wilkinson told him stories of the exquisite delicacy of Frenchmen when they stood in the same relation to fair ladies as he to Miss Wilkinson. She praised their courtesy, their passion for self-sacrifice, their perfect tact. Miss Wilkinson seemed to want a great deal.

Philip listened to her enumeration of the qualities which must be possessed by the perfect lover, and he could not help feeling a certain satisfaction that she lived in Berlin.

“You will write to me, won’t you? Write to me every day. I want to know everything you’re doing. You must keep nothing from me.”

“I shall be awfully, busy” he answered. “I’ll write as often as I can.”

She flung her arms passionately round his neck. He was embarrassed sometimes by the demonstrations of her affection. He would have preferred her to be more passive. It shocked him a little that she should give him so marked a lead: it did not tally altogether with his prepossessions about the modesty of the feminine temperament.

At length the day came on which Miss Wilkinson was to go, and she came down to breakfast, pale and subdued, in a serviceable travelling dress of black and white check. She looked a very competent governess. Philip was silent too, for he did not quite know what to say that would fit the circumstance; and he was terribly afraid that, if he said something flippant, Miss Wilkinson would break down before his uncle and make a scene. They had said their last good-bye to one another in the garden the night before, and Philip was relieved that there was now no opportunity for them to be alone. He remained in the dining-room after breakfast in case Miss Wilkinson should insist on kissing him on the stairs. He did not want Mary Ann, now a woman hard upon middle age with a sharp tongue, to catch them in a compromising position. Mary Ann did not like Miss Wilkinson and called her an old cat. Aunt Louisa was not very well and could not come to the station, but the Vicar and Philip saw her off. Just as the train was leaving she leaned out and kissed Mr. Carey.

“I must kiss you too, Philip,” she said.

“All right,” he said, blushing.

He stood up on the step and she kissed him quickly. The train started, and Miss Wilkinson sank into the corner of her carriage and wept disconsolately. Philip, as he walked back to the vicarage, felt a distinct sensation of relief.

“Well, did you see her safely off?” asked Aunt Louisa, when they got in.

“Yes, she seemed rather weepy. She insisted on kissing me and Philip.”

“Oh, well, at her age it’s not dangerous.” Mrs. Carey pointed to the sideboard. “There’s a letter for you, Philip. It came by the second post.”

It was from Hayward and ran as follows:

My dear boy,

I answer your letter at once. I ventured to read it to a great friend of mine, a charming woman whose help and sympathy have been very precious to me, a woman withal with a real feeling for art and literature; and we agreed that it was charming. You wrote from your heart and you do not know the delightful naivete which is in every line. And because you love you write like a poet. Ah, dear boy, that is the real thing: I felt the glow of your young passion, and your prose was musical from the sincerity of your emotion. You must be happy! I wish I could have been present unseen in that enchanted garden while you wandered hand in hand, like Daphnis and Chloe, amid the flowers. I can see you, my Daphnis, with the light of young love in your eyes, tender, enraptured, and ardent; while Chloe in your arms, so young and soft and fresh, vowing she would ne’er consent—consented. Roses and violets and honeysuckle! Oh, my friend, I envy you. It is so good to think that your first love should have been pure poetry. Treasure the moments, for the immortal gods have given you the Greatest Gift of All, and it will be a sweet, sad memory till your dying day. You will never again enjoy that careless rapture. First love is best love; and she is beautiful and you are young, and all the world is yours. I felt my pulse go faster when with your adorable simplicity you told me that you buried your face in her long hair. I am sure that it is that exquisite chestnut which seems just touched with gold. I would have you sit under a leafy tree side by side, and read together Romeo and Juliet; and then I would have you fall on your knees and on my behalf kiss the ground on which her foot has left its imprint; then tell her it is the homage of a poet to her radiant youth and to your love for her. Yours always, G. Etheridge Hayward.

“What damned rot!” said Philip, when he finished the letter.

Miss Wilkinson oddly enough had suggested that they should read Romeo and Juliet together; but Philip had firmly declined. Then, as he put the letter in his pocket, he felt a queer little pang of bitterness because reality seemed so different from the ideal.

XXXVI

A few days later Philip went to London. The curate had recommended rooms in Barnes, and these Philip engaged by letter at fourteen shillings a week. He reached them in the evening; and the landlady, a funny little old woman with a shrivelled body and a deeply wrinkled face, had prepared high tea for him. Most of the sitting-room was taken up by the sideboard and a square table; against one wall was a sofa covered with horsehair, and by the fireplace an arm-chair to match: there was a white antimacassar over the back of it, and on the seat, because the springs were broken, a hard cushion.

After having his tea he unpacked and arranged his books, then he sat down and tried to read; but he was depressed. The silence in the street made him slightly uncomfortable, and he felt very much alone.

Next day he got up early. He put on his tail-coat and the tall hat which he had worn at school; but it was very shabby, and he made up his mind to stop at the Stores on his way to the office and buy a new one. When he had done this he found himself in plenty of time and so walked along the Strand. The office of Messrs. Herbert Carter & Co. was in a little street off Chancery Lane, and he had to ask his way two or three times. He felt that people were staring at him a great deal, and once he took off his hat to see whether by chance the label had been left on. When he arrived he knocked at the door; but no one answered, and looking at his watch he found it was barely half past nine; he supposed he was too early. He went away and ten minutes later returned to find an office-boy, with a long nose, pimply face, and a Scotch accent, opening the door. Philip asked for Mr. Herbert Carter. He had not come yet.

“When will he be here?”

“Between ten and half past.”

“I’d better wait,” said Philip.

“What are you wanting?” asked the office-boy.

Philip was nervous, but tried to hide the fact by a jocose manner.

“Well, I’m going to work here if you have no objection.”

“Oh, you’re the new articled clerk? You’d better come in. Mr. Goodworthy’ll be here in a while.”

Philip walked in, and as he did so saw the office-boy—he was about the same age as Philip and called himself a junior clerk—look at his foot. He flushed and, sitting down, hid it behind the other. He looked round the room. It was dark and very dingy. It was lit by a skylight. There were three rows of desks in it and against them high stools. Over the chimney-piece was a dirty engraving of a prize-fight. Presently a clerk came in and then another; they glanced at Philip and in an undertone asked the office-boy (Philip found his name was Macdougal) who he was. A whistle blew, and Macdougal got up.

“Mr. Goodworthy’s come. He’s the managing clerk. Shall I tell him you’re here?”

“Yes, please,” said Philip.

The office-boy went out and in a moment returned.

“Will you come this way?”

Philip followed him across the passage and was shown into a room, small and barely furnished, in which a little, thin man was standing with his back to the fireplace. He was much below the middle height, but his large head, which seemed to hang loosely on his body, gave him an odd ungainliness. His features were wide and flattened, and he had prominent, pale eyes; his thin hair was sandy; he wore whiskers that grew unevenly on his face, and in places where you would have expected the hair to grow thickly there was no hair at all. His skin was pasty and yellow. He held out his hand to Philip, and when he smiled showed badly decayed teeth. He spoke with a patronising and at the same time a timid air, as though he sought to assume an importance which he did not feel. He said he hoped Philip would like the work; there was a good deal of drudgery about it, but when you got used to it, it was interesting; and one made money, that was the chief thing, wasn’t it? He laughed with his odd mixture of superiority and shyness.

“Mr. Carter will be here presently,” he said. “He’s a little late on Monday mornings sometimes. I’ll call you when he comes. In the meantime I must give you something to do. Do you know anything about book-keeping or accounts?”

“I’m afraid not,” answered Philip.

“I didn’t suppose you would. They don’t teach you things at school that are much use in business, I’m afraid.” He considered for a moment. “I think I can find you something to do.”

He went into the next room and after a little while came out with a large cardboard box. It contained a vast number of letters in great disorder, and he told Philip to sort them out and arrange them alphabetically according to the names of the writers.

“I’ll take you to the room in which the articled clerk generally sits. There’s a very nice fellow in it. His name is Watson. He’s a son of Watson, Crag, and Thompson—you know—the brewers. He’s spending a year with us to learn business.”

Mr. Goodworthy led Philip through the dingy office, where now six or eight clerks were working, into a narrow room behind. It had been made into a separate apartment by a glass partition, and here they found Watson sitting back in a chair, reading The Sportsman. He was a large, stout young man, elegantly dressed, and he looked up as Mr. Goodworthy entered. He asserted his position by calling the managing clerk Goodworthy. The managing clerk objected to the familiarity, and pointedly called him Mr. Watson, but Watson, instead of seeing that it was a rebuke, accepted the title as a tribute to his gentlemanliness.

“I see they’ve scratched Rigoletto,” he said to Philip, as soon as they were left alone.

“Have they?” said Philip, who knew nothing about horse-racing.

He looked with awe upon Watson’s beautiful clothes. His tail-coat fitted him perfectly, and there was a valuable pin artfully stuck in the middle of an enormous tie. On the chimney-piece rested his tall hat; it was saucy and bell-shaped and shiny. Philip felt himself very shabby. Watson began to talk of hunting—it was such an infernal bore having to waste one’s time in an infernal office, he would only be able to hunt on Saturdays—and shooting: he had ripping invitations all over the country and of course he had to refuse them. It was infernal luck, but he wasn’t going to put up with it long; he was only in this internal hole for a year, and then he was going into the business, and he would hunt four days a week and get all the shooting there was.

“You’ve got five years of it, haven’t you?” he said, waving his arm round the tiny room.

“I suppose so,” said Philip.

“I daresay I shall see something of you. Carter does our accounts, you know.”

Philip was somewhat overpowered by the young gentleman’s condescension. At Blackstable they had always looked upon brewing with civil contempt, the Vicar made little jokes about the beerage, and it was a surprising experience for Philip to discover that Watson was such an important and magnificent fellow. He had been to Winchester and to Oxford, and his conversation impressed the fact upon one with frequency. When he discovered the details of Philip’s education his manner became more patronising still.

“Of course, if one doesn’t go to a public school those sort of schools are the next best thing, aren’t they?”

Philip asked about the other men in the office.

“Oh, I don’t bother about them much, you know,” said Watson. “Carter’s not a bad sort. We have him to dine now and then. All the rest are awful bounders.”

Presently Watson applied himself to some work he had in hand, and Philip set about sorting his letters. Then Mr. Goodworthy came in to say that Mr. Carter had arrived. He took Philip into a large room next door to his own. There was a big desk in it, and a couple of big arm-chairs; a Turkey carpet adorned the floor, and the walls were decorated with sporting prints. Mr. Carter was sitting at the desk and got up to shake hands with Philip. He was dressed in a long frock coat. He looked like a military man; his moustache was waxed, his gray hair was short and neat, he held himself upright, he talked in a breezy way, he lived at Enfield. He was very keen on games and the good of the country. He was an officer in the Hertfordshire Yeomanry and chairman of the Conservative Association. When he was told that a local magnate had said no one would take him for a City man, he felt that he had not lived in vain. He talked to Philip in a pleasant, off-hand fashion. Mr. Goodworthy would look after him. Watson was a nice fellow, perfect gentleman, good sportsman—did Philip hunt? Pity, THE sport for gentlemen. Didn’t have much chance of hunting now, had to leave that to his son. His son was at Cambridge, he’d sent him to Rugby, fine school Rugby, nice class of boys there, in a couple of years his son would be articled, that would be nice for Philip, he’d like his son, thorough sportsman. He hoped Philip would get on well and like the work, he mustn’t miss his lectures, they were getting up the tone of the profession, they wanted gentlemen in it. Well, well, Mr. Goodworthy was there. If he wanted to know anything Mr. Goodworthy would tell him. What was his handwriting like? Ah well, Mr. Goodworthy would see about that.

Philip was overwhelmed by so much gentlemanliness: in East Anglia they knew who were gentlemen and who weren’t, but the gentlemen didn’t talk about it.

XXXVII

At first the novelty of the work kept Philip interested. Mr. Carter dictated letters to him, and he had to make fair copies of statements of accounts.

Mr. Carter preferred to conduct the office on gentlemanly lines; he would have nothing to do with typewriting and looked upon shorthand with disfavour: the office-boy knew shorthand, but it was only Mr. Goodworthy who made use of his accomplishment. Now and then Philip with one of the more experienced clerks went out to audit the accounts of some firm: he came to know which of the clients must be treated with respect and which were in low water. Now and then long lists of figures were given him to add up. He attended lectures for his first examination. Mr. Goodworthy repeated to him that the work was dull at first, but he would grow used to it. Philip left the office at six and walked across the river to Waterloo. His supper was waiting for him when he reached his lodgings and he spent the evening reading. On Saturday afternoons he went to the National Gallery. Hayward had recommended to him a guide which had been compiled out of Ruskin’s works, and with this in hand he went industriously through room after room: he read carefully what the critic had said about a picture and then in a determined fashion set himself to see the same things in it. His Sundays were difficult to get through. He knew no one in London and spent them by himself. Mr. Nixon, the solicitor, asked him to spend a Sunday at Hampstead, and Philip passed a happy day with a set of exuberant strangers; he ate and drank a great deal, took a walk on the heath, and came away with a general invitation to come again whenever he liked; but he was morbidly afraid of being in the way, so waited for a formal invitation. Naturally enough it never came, for with numbers of friends of their own the Nixons did not think of the lonely, silent boy whose claim upon their hospitality was so small. So on Sundays he got up late and took a walk along the tow-path. At Barnes the river is muddy, dingy, and tidal; it has neither the graceful charm of the Thames above the locks nor the romance of the crowded stream below London Bridge. In the afternoon he walked about the common; and that is gray and dingy too; it is neither country nor town; the gorse is stunted; and all about is the litter of civilisation. He went to a play every Saturday night and stood cheerfully for an hour or more at the gallery-door. It was not worth while to go back to Barnes for the interval between the closing of the Museum and his meal in an A. B. C. shop, and the time hung heavily on his hands. He strolled up Bond Street or through the Burlington Arcade, and when he was tired went and sat down in the Park or in wet weather in the public library in St. Martin’s Lane. He looked at the people walking about and envied them because they had friends; sometimes his envy turned to hatred because they were happy and he was miserable. He had never imagined that it was possible to be so lonely in a great city. Sometimes when he was standing at the gallery-door the man next to him would attempt a conversation; but Philip had the country boy’s suspicion of strangers and answered in such a way as to prevent any further acquaintance. After the play was over, obliged to keep to himself all he thought about it, he hurried across the bridge to Waterloo. When he got back to his rooms, in which for economy no fire had been lit, his heart sank. It was horribly cheerless. He began to loathe his lodgings and the long solitary evenings he spent in them. Sometimes he felt so lonely that he could not read, and then he sat looking into the fire hour after hour in bitter wretchedness.

He had spent three months in London now, and except for that one Sunday at Hampstead had never talked to anyone but his fellow-clerks. One evening Watson asked him to dinner at a restaurant and they went to a music-hall together; but he felt shy and uncomfortable. Watson talked all the time of things he did not care about, and while he looked upon Watson as a Philistine he could not help admiring him. He was angry because Watson obviously set no store on his culture, and with his way of taking himself at the estimate at which he saw others held him he began to despise the acquirements which till then had seemed to him not unimportant. He felt for the first time the humiliation of poverty. His uncle sent him fourteen pounds a month and he had had to buy a good many clothes. His evening suit cost him five guineas. He had not dared tell Watson that it was bought in the Strand. Watson said there was only one tailor in London.

“I suppose you don’t dance,” said Watson, one day, with a glance at Philip’s club-foot.

“No,” said Philip.

“Pity. I’ve been asked to bring some dancing men to a ball. I could have introduced you to some jolly girls.”

Once or twice, hating the thought of going back to Barnes, Philip had remained in town, and late in the evening wandered through the West End till he found some house at which there was a party. He stood among the little group of shabby people, behind the footmen, watching the guests arrive, and he listened to the music that floated through the window. Sometimes, notwithstanding the cold, a couple came on to the balcony and stood for a moment to get some fresh air; and Philip, imagining that they were in love with one another, turned away and limped along the street with a heavy hurt. He would never be able to stand in that man’s place. He felt that no woman could ever really look upon him without distaste for his deformity.

That reminded him of Miss Wilkinson. He thought of her without satisfaction. Before parting they had made an arrangement that she should write to Charing Cross Post Office till he was able to send her an address, and when he went there he found three letters from her. She wrote on blue paper with violet ink, and she wrote in French. Philip wondered why she could not write in English like a sensible woman, and her passionate expressions, because they reminded him of a French novel, left him cold. She upbraided him for not having written, and when he answered he excused himself by saying that he had been busy. He did not quite know how to start the letter. He could not bring himself to use dearest or darling, and he hated to address her as Emily, so finally he began with the word dear. It looked odd, standing by itself, and rather silly, but he made it do. It was the first love letter he had ever written, and he was conscious of its tameness; he felt that he should say all sorts of vehement things, how he thought of her every minute of the day and how he longed to kiss her beautiful hands and how he trembled at the thought of her red lips, but some inexplicable modesty prevented him; and instead he told her of his new rooms and his office. The answer came by return of post, angry, heart-broken, reproachful: how could he be so cold? Did he not know that she hung on his letters? She had given him all that a woman could give, and this was her reward. Was he tired of her already? Then, because he did not reply for several days, Miss Wilkinson bombarded him with letters. She could not bear his unkindness, she waited for the post, and it never brought her his letter, she cried herself to sleep night after night, she was looking so ill that everyone remarked on it: if he did not love her why did he not say so? She added that she could not live without him, and the only thing was for her to commit suicide. She told him he was cold and selfish and ungrateful. It was all in French, and Philip knew that she wrote in that language to show off, but he was worried all the same. He did not want to make her unhappy. In a little while she wrote that she could not bear the separation any longer, she would arrange to come over to London for Christmas. Philip wrote back that he would like nothing better, only he had already an engagement to spend Christmas with friends in the country, and he did not see how he could break it. She answered that she did not wish to force herself on him, it was quite evident that he did not wish to see her; she was deeply hurt, and she never thought he would repay with such cruelty all her kindness. Her letter was touching, and Philip thought he saw marks of her tears on the paper; he wrote an impulsive reply saying that he was dreadfully sorry and imploring her to come; but it was with relief that he received her answer in which she said that she found it would be impossible for her to get away. Presently when her letters came his heart sank: he delayed opening them, for he knew what they would contain, angry reproaches and pathetic appeals; they would make him feel a perfect beast, and yet he did not see with what he had to blame himself. He put off his answer from day to day, and then another letter would come, saying she was ill and lonely and miserable.

“I wish to God I’d never had anything to do with her,” he said.

He admired Watson because he arranged these things so easily. The young man had been engaged in an intrigue with a girl who played in touring companies, and his account of the affair filled Philip with envious amazement. But after a time Watson’s young affections changed, and one day he described the rupture to Philip.

“I thought it was no good making any bones about it so I just told her I’d had enough of her,” he said.

“Didn’t she make an awful scene?” asked Philip.

“The usual thing, you know, but I told her it was no good trying on that sort of thing with me.”

“Did she cry?”

“She began to, but I can’t stand women when they cry, so I said she’d better hook it.”

Philip’s sense of humour was growing keener with advancing years.

“And did she hook it?” he asked smiling.

“Well, there wasn’t anything else for her to do, was there?”

Meanwhile the Christmas holidays approached. Mrs. Carey had been ill all through November, and the doctor suggested that she and the Vicar should go to Cornwall for a couple of weeks round Christmas so that she should get back her strength. The result was that Philip had nowhere to go, and he spent Christmas Day in his lodgings. Under Hayward’s influence he had persuaded himself that the festivities that attend this season were vulgar and barbaric, and he made up his mind that he would take no notice of the day; but when it came, the jollity of all around affected him strangely. His landlady and her husband were spending the day with a married daughter, and to save trouble Philip announced that he would take his meals out. He went up to London towards mid-day and ate a slice of turkey and some Christmas pudding by himself at Gatti’s, and since he had nothing to do afterwards went to Westminster Abbey for the afternoon service. The streets were almost empty, and the people who went along had a preoccupied look; they did not saunter but walked with some definite goal in view, and hardly anyone was alone. To Philip they all seemed happy. He felt himself more solitary than he had ever done in his life. His intention had been to kill the day somehow in the streets and then dine at a restaurant, but he could not face again the sight of cheerful people, talking, laughing, and making merry; so he went back to Waterloo, and on his way through the Westminster Bridge Road bought some ham and a couple of mince pies and went back to Barnes. He ate his food in his lonely little room and spent the evening with a book. His depression was almost intolerable.

When he was back at the office it made him very sore to listen to Watson’s account of the short holiday. They had had some jolly girls staying with them, and after dinner they had cleared out the drawing-room and had a dance.

“I didn’t get to bed till three and I don’t know how I got there then. By George, I was squiffy.”

At last Philip asked desperately:

“How does one get to know people in London?”

Watson looked at him with surprise and with a slightly contemptuous amusement.

“Oh, I don’t know, one just knows them. If you go to dances you soon get to know as many people as you can do with.”

Philip hated Watson, and yet he would have given anything to change places with him. The old feeling that he had had at school came back to him, and he tried to throw himself into the other’s skin, imagining what life would be if he were Watson.

XXXVIII

At the end of the year there was a great deal to do. Philip went to various places with a clerk named Thompson and spent the day monotonously calling out items of expenditure, which the other checked; and sometimes he was given long pages of figures to add up. He had never had a head for figures, and he could only do this slowly. Thompson grew irritated at his mistakes. His fellow-clerk was a long, lean man of forty, sallow, with black hair and a ragged moustache; he had hollow cheeks and deep lines on each side of his nose. He took a dislike to Philip because he was an articled clerk. Because he could put down three hundred guineas and keep himself for five years Philip had the chance of a career; while he, with his experience and ability, had no possibility of ever being more than a clerk at thirty-five shillings a week. He was a cross-grained man, oppressed by a large family, and he resented the superciliousness which he fancied he saw in Philip. He sneered at Philip because he was better educated than himself, and he mocked at Philip’s pronunciation; he could not forgive him because he spoke without a cockney accent, and when he talked to him sarcastically exaggerated his aitches. At first his manner was merely gruff and repellent, but as he discovered that Philip had no gift for accountancy he took pleasure in humiliating him; his attacks were gross and silly, but they wounded Philip, and in self-defence he assumed an attitude of superiority which he did not feel.

“Had a bath this morning?” Thompson said when Philip came to the office late, for his early punctuality had not lasted.

“Yes, haven’t you?”

“No, I’m not a gentleman, I’m only a clerk. I have a bath on Saturday night.”

“I suppose that’s why you’re more than usually disagreeable on Monday.”

“Will you condescend to do a few sums in simple addition today? I’m afraid it’s asking a great deal from a gentleman who knows Latin and Greek.”

“Your attempts at sarcasm are not very happy.”

But Philip could not conceal from himself that the other clerks, ill-paid and uncouth, were more useful than himself. Once or twice Mr. Goodworthy grew impatient with him.

“You really ought to be able to do better than this by now,” he said. “You’re not even as smart as the office-boy.”

Philip listened sulkily. He did not like being blamed, and it humiliated him, when, having been given accounts to make fair copies of, Mr. Goodworthy was not satisfied and gave them to another clerk to do. At first the work had been tolerable from its novelty, but now it grew irksome; and when he discovered that he had no aptitude for it, he began to hate it. Often, when he should have been doing something that was given him, he wasted his time drawing little pictures on the office note-paper. He made sketches of Watson in every conceivable attitude, and Watson was impressed by his talent. It occurred to him to take the drawings home, and he came back next day with the praises of his family.

“I wonder you didn’t become a painter,” he said. “Only of course there’s no money in it.”

It chanced that Mr. Carter two or three days later was dining with the Watsons, and the sketches were shown him. The following morning he sent for Philip. Philip saw him seldom and stood in some awe of him.

“Look here, young fellow, I don’t care what you do out of office-hours, but I’ve seen those sketches of yours and they’re on office-paper, and Mr. Goodworthy tells me you’re slack. You won’t do any good as a chartered accountant unless you look alive. It’s a fine profession, and we’re getting a very good class of men in it, but it’s a profession in which you have to…” he looked for the termination of his phrase, but could not find exactly what he wanted, so finished rather tamely, “in which you have to look alive.”

Perhaps Philip would have settled down but for the agreement that if he did not like the work he could leave after a year, and get back half the money paid for his articles. He felt that he was fit for something better than to add up accounts, and it was humiliating that he did so ill something which seemed contemptible. The vulgar scenes with Thompson got on his nerves. In March Watson ended his year at the office and Philip, though he did not care for him, saw him go with regret. The fact that the other clerks disliked them equally, because they belonged to a class a little higher than their own, was a bond of union. When Philip thought that he must spend over four years more with that dreary set of fellows his heart sank. He had expected wonderful things from London and it had given him nothing. He hated it now. He did not know a soul, and he had no idea how he was to get to know anyone. He was tired of going everywhere by himself. He began to feel that he could not stand much more of such a life. He would lie in bed at night and think of the joy of never seeing again that dingy office or any of the men in it, and of getting away from those drab lodgings.

A great disappointment befell him in the spring. Hayward had announced his intention of coming to London for the season, and Philip had looked forward very much to seeing him again. He had read so much lately and thought so much that his mind was full of ideas which he wanted to discuss, and he knew nobody who was willing to interest himself in abstract things. He was quite excited at the thought of talking his fill with someone, and he was wretched when Hayward wrote to say that the spring was lovelier than ever he had known it in Italy, and he could not bear to tear himself away. He went on to ask why Philip did not come. What was the use of squandering the days of his youth in an office when the world was beautiful? The letter proceeded.

I wonder you can bear it. I think of Fleet Street and Lincoln’s Inn now with a shudder of disgust. There are only two things in the world that make life worth living, love and art. I cannot imagine you sitting in an office over a ledger, and do you wear a tall hat and an umbrella and a little black bag? My feeling is that one should look upon life as an adventure, one should burn with the hard, gem-like flame, and one should take risks, one should expose oneself to danger. Why do you not go to Paris and study art? I always thought you had talent.

The suggestion fell in with the possibility that Philip for some time had been vaguely turning over in his mind. It startled him at first, but he could not help thinking of it, and in the constant rumination over it he found his only escape from the wretchedness of his present state. They all thought he had talent; at Heidelberg they had admired his water colours, Miss Wilkinson had told him over and over again that they were chasing; even strangers like the Watsons had been struck by his sketches. La Vie de Boheme had made a deep impression on him. He had brought it to London and when he was most depressed he had only to read a few pages to be transported into those chasing attics where Rodolphe and the rest of them danced and loved and sang. He began to think of Paris as before he had thought of London, but he had no fear of a second disillusion; he yearned for romance and beauty and love, and Paris seemed to offer them all. He had a passion for pictures, and why should he not be able to paint as well as anybody else? He wrote to Miss Wilkinson and asked her how much she thought he could live on in Paris. She told him that he could manage easily on eighty pounds a year, and she enthusiastically approved of his project. She told him he was too good to be wasted in an office. Who would be a clerk when he might be a great artist, she asked dramatically, and she besought Philip to believe in himself: that was the great thing. But Philip had a cautious nature. It was all very well for Hayward to talk of taking risks, he had three hundred a year in gilt-edged securities; Philip’s entire fortune amounted to no more than eighteen-hundred pounds. He hesitated.

Then it chanced that one day Mr. Goodworthy asked him suddenly if he would like to go to Paris. The firm did the accounts for a hotel in the Faubourg St. Honore, which was owned by an English company, and twice a year Mr. Goodworthy and a clerk went over. The clerk who generally went happened to be ill, and a press of work prevented any of the others from getting away. Mr. Goodworthy thought of Philip because he could best be spared, and his articles gave him some claim upon a job which was one of the pleasures of the business. Philip was delighted.

“You’ll ’ave to work all day,” said Mr. Goodworthy, “but we get our evenings to ourselves, and Paris is Paris.” He smiled in a knowing way. “They do us very well at the hotel, and they give us all our meals, so it don’t cost one anything. That’s the way I like going to Paris, at other people’s expense.”

When they arrived at Calais and Philip saw the crowd of gesticulating porters his heart leaped.

“This is the real thing,” he said to himself.

He was all eyes as the train sped through the country; he adored the sand dunes, their colour seemed to him more lovely than anything he had ever seen; and he was enchanted with the canals and the long lines of poplars. When they got out of the Gare du Nord, and trundled along the cobbled streets in a ramshackle, noisy cab, it seemed to him that he was breathing a new air so intoxicating that he could hardly restrain himself from shouting aloud. They were met at the door of the hotel by the manager, a stout, pleasant man, who spoke tolerable English; Mr. Goodworthy was an old friend and he greeted them effusively; they dined in his private room with his wife, and to Philip it seemed that he had never eaten anything so delicious as the beefsteak aux pommes, nor drunk such nectar as the vin ordinaire, which were set before them.

To Mr. Goodworthy, a respectable householder with excellent principles, the capital of France was a paradise of the joyously obscene. He asked the manager next morning what there was to be seen that was ‘thick.’ He thoroughly enjoyed these visits of his to Paris; he said they kept you from growing rusty. In the evenings, after their work was over and they had dined, he took Philip to the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergeres. His little eyes twinkled and his face wore a sly, sensual smile as he sought out the pornographic. He went into all the haunts which were specially arranged for the foreigner, and afterwards said that a nation could come to no good which permitted that sort of thing. He nudged Philip when at some revue a woman appeared with practically nothing on, and pointed out to him the most strapping of the courtesans who walked about the hall. It was a vulgar Paris that he showed Philip, but Philip saw it with eyes blinded with illusion. In the early morning he would rush out of the hotel and go to the Champs Elysees, and stand at the Place de la Concorde. It was June, and Paris was silvery with the delicacy of the air. Philip felt his heart go out to the people. Here he thought at last was romance.

They spent the inside of a week there, leaving on Sunday, and when Philip late at night reached his dingy rooms in Barnes his mind was made up; he would surrender his articles, and go to Paris to study art; but so that no one should think him unreasonable he determined to stay at the office till his year was up. He was to have his holiday during the last fortnight in August, and when he went away he would tell Herbert Carter that he had no intention of returning. But though Philip could force himself to go to the office every day he could not even pretend to show any interest in the work. His mind was occupied with the future. After the middle of July there was nothing much to do and he escaped a good deal by pretending he had to go to lectures for his first examination. The time he got in this way he spent in the National Gallery. He read books about Paris and books about painting. He was steeped in Ruskin. He read many of Vasari’s lives of the painters. He liked that story of Correggio, and he fancied himself standing before some great masterpiece and crying: Anch’ io son’ pittore. His hesitation had left him now, and he was convinced that he had in him the makings of a great painter.

“After all, I can only try,” he said to himself. “The great thing in life is to take risks.”

At last came the middle of August. Mr. Carter was spending the month in Scotland, and the managing clerk was in charge of the office. Mr. Goodworthy had seemed pleasantly disposed to Philip since their trip to Paris, and now that Philip knew he was so soon to be free, he could look upon the funny little man with tolerance.

“You’re going for your holiday tomorrow, Carey?” he said to him in the evening.

All day Philip had been telling himself that this was the last time he would ever sit in that hateful office.

“Yes, this is the end of my year.”

“I’m afraid you’ve not done very well. Mr. Carter’s very dissatisfied with you.”

“Not nearly so dissatisfied as I am with Mr. Carter,” returned Philip cheerfully.

“I don’t think you should speak like that, Carey.”

“I’m not coming back. I made the arrangement that if I didn’t like accountancy Mr. Carter would return me half the money I paid for my articles and I could chuck it at the end of a year.”

“You shouldn’t come to such a decision hastily.”

“For ten months I’ve loathed it all, I’ve loathed the work, I’ve loathed the office, I loathe London. I’d rather sweep a crossing than spend my days here.”

“Well, I must say, I don’t think you’re very fitted for accountancy.”

“Good-bye,” said Philip, holding out his hand. “I want to thank you for your kindness to me. I’m sorry if I’ve been troublesome. I knew almost from the beginning I was no good.”

“Well, if you really do make up your mind it is good-bye. I don’t know what you’re going to do, but if you’re in the neighbourhood at any time come in and see us.”

Philip gave a little laugh.

“I’m afraid it sounds very rude, but I hope from the bottom of my heart that I shall never set eyes on any of you again.”

XXXIX

The Vicar of Blackstable would have nothing to do with the scheme which Philip laid before him. He had a great idea that one should stick to whatever one had begun. Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one’s mind.

“You chose to be an accountant of your own free will,” he said.

“I just took that because it was the only chance I saw of getting up to town. I hate London, I hate the work, and nothing will induce me to go back to it.”

Mr. and Mrs. Carey were frankly shocked at Philip’s idea of being an artist. He should not forget, they said, that his father and mother were gentlefolk, and painting wasn’t a serious profession; it was Bohemian, disreputable, immoral. And then Paris!

“So long as I have anything to say in the matter, I shall not allow you to live in Paris,” said the Vicar firmly.

It was a sink of iniquity. The scarlet woman and she of Babylon flaunted their vileness there; the cities of the plain were not more wicked.

“You’ve been brought up like a gentleman and Christian, and I should be false to the trust laid upon me by your dead father and mother if I allowed you to expose yourself to such temptation.”

“Well, I know I’m not a Christian and I’m beginning to doubt whether I’m a gentleman,” said Philip.

The dispute grew more violent. There was another year before Philip took possession of his small inheritance, and during that time Mr. Carey proposed only to give him an allowance if he remained at the office. It was clear to Philip that if he meant not to continue with accountancy he must leave it while he could still get back half the money that had been paid for his articles. The Vicar would not listen. Philip, losing all reserve, said things to wound and irritate.

“You’ve got no right to waste my money,” he said at last. “After all it’s my money, isn’t it? I’m not a child. You can’t prevent me from going to Paris if I make up my mind to. You can’t force me to go back to London.”

“All I can do is to refuse you money unless you do what I think fit.”

“Well, I don’t care, I’ve made up my mind to go to Paris. I shall sell my clothes, and my books, and my father’s jewellery.”

Aunt Louisa sat by in silence, anxious and unhappy. She saw that Philip was beside himself, and anything she said then would but increase his anger. Finally the Vicar announced that he wished to hear nothing more about it and with dignity left the room. For the next three days neither Philip nor he spoke to one another. Philip wrote to Hayward for information about Paris, and made up his mind to set out as soon as he got a reply. Mrs. Carey turned the matter over in her mind incessantly; she felt that Philip included her in the hatred he bore her husband, and the thought tortured her. She loved him with all her heart. At length she spoke to him; she listened attentively while he poured out all his disillusionment of London and his eager ambition for the future.

“I may be no good, but at least let me have a try. I can’t be a worse failure than I was in that beastly office. And I feel that I can paint. I know I’ve got it in me.”

She was not so sure as her husband that they did right in thwarting so strong an inclination. She had read of great painters whose parents had opposed their wish to study, the event had shown with what folly; and after all it was just as possible for a painter to lead a virtuous life to the glory of God as for a chartered accountant.

“I’m so afraid of your going to Paris,” she said piteously. “It wouldn’t be so bad if you studied in London.”

“If I’m going in for painting I must do it thoroughly, and it’s only in Paris that you can get the real thing.”

At his suggestion Mrs. Carey wrote to the solicitor, saying that Philip was discontented with his work in London, and asking what he thought of a change. Mr. Nixon answered as follows:

Dear Mrs. Carey,

I have seen Mr. Herbert Carter, and I am afraid I must tell you that Philip has not done so well as one could have wished. If he is very strongly set against the work, perhaps it is better that he should take the opportunity there is now to break his articles. I am naturally very disappointed, but as you know you can take a horse to the water, but you can’t make him drink.

Yours very sincerely, Albert Nixon.

The letter was shown to the Vicar, but served only to increase his obstinacy. He was willing enough that Philip should take up some other profession, he suggested his father’s calling, medicine, but nothing would induce him to pay an allowance if Philip went to Paris.

“It’s a mere excuse for self-indulgence and sensuality,” he said.

“I’m interested to hear you blame self-indulgence in others,” retorted Philip acidly.

But by this time an answer had come from Hayward, giving the name of a hotel where Philip could get a room for thirty francs a month and enclosing a note of introduction to the massiere of a school. Philip read the letter to Mrs. Carey and told her he proposed to start on the first of September.

“But you haven’t got any money?” she said.

“I’m going into Tercanbury this afternoon to sell the jewellery.”

He had inherited from his father a gold watch and chain, two or three rings, some links, and two pins. One of them was a pearl and might fetch a considerable sum.

“It’s a very different thing, what a thing’s worth and what it’ll fetch,” said Aunt Louisa.

Philip smiled, for this was one of his uncle’s stock phrases.

“I know, but at the worst I think I can get a hundred pounds on the lot, and that’ll keep me till I’m twenty-one.”

Mrs. Carey did not answer, but she went upstairs, put on her little black bonnet, and went to the bank. In an hour she came back. She went to Philip, who was reading in the drawing-room, and handed him an envelope.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“It’s a little present for you,” she answered, smiling shyly.

He opened it and found eleven five-pound notes and a little paper sack bulging with sovereigns.

“I couldn’t bear to let you sell your father’s jewellery. It’s the money I had in the bank. It comes to very nearly a hundred pounds.”

Philip blushed, and, he knew not why, tears suddenly filled his eyes.

“Oh, my dear, I can’t take it,” he said. “It’s most awfully good of you, but I couldn’t bear to take it.”

When Mrs. Carey was married she had three hundred pounds, and this money, carefully watched, had been used by her to meet any unforeseen expense, any urgent charity, or to buy Christmas and birthday presents for her husband and for Philip. In the course of years it had diminished sadly, but it was still with the Vicar a subject for jesting. He talked of his wife as a rich woman and he constantly spoke of the ‘nest egg.’

“Oh, please take it, Philip. I’m so sorry I’ve been extravagant, and there’s only that left. But it’ll make me so happy if you’ll accept it.”

“But you’ll want it,” said Philip.

“No, I don’t think I shall. I was keeping it in case your uncle died before me. I thought it would be useful to have a little something I could get at immediately if I wanted it, but I don’t think I shall live very much longer now.”

“Oh, my dear, don’t say that. Why, of course you’re going to live for ever. I can’t possibly spare you.”

“Oh, I’m not sorry.” Her voice broke and she hid her eyes, but in a moment, drying them, she smiled bravely. “At first, I used to pray to God that He might not take me first, because I didn’t want your uncle to be left alone, I didn’t want him to have all the suffering, but now I know that it wouldn’t mean so much to your uncle as it would mean to me. He wants to live more than I do, I’ve never been the wife he wanted, and I daresay he’d marry again if anything happened to me. So I should like to go first. You don’t think it’s selfish of me, Philip, do you? But I couldn’t bear it if he went.”

Philip kissed her wrinkled, thin cheek. He did not know why the sight he had of that overwhelming love made him feel strangely ashamed. It was incomprehensible that she should care so much for a man who was so indifferent, so selfish, so grossly self-indulgent; and he divined dimly that in her heart she knew his indifference and his selfishness, knew them and loved him humbly all the same.

“You will take the money, Philip?” she said, gently stroking his hand. “I know you can do without it, but it’ll give me so much happiness. I’ve always wanted to do something for you. You see, I never had a child of my own, and I’ve loved you as if you were my son. When you were a little boy, though I knew it was wicked, I used to wish almost that you might be ill, so that I could nurse you day and night. But you were only ill once and then it was at school. I should so like to help you. It’s the only chance I shall ever have. And perhaps some day when you’re a great artist you won’t forget me, but you’ll remember that I gave you your start.”

“It’s very good of you,” said Philip. “I’m very grateful.” A smile came into her tired eyes, a smile of pure happiness.

“Oh, I’m so glad.”

XL

A few days later Mrs. Carey went to the station to see Philip off. She stood at the door of the carriage, trying to keep back her tears. Philip was restless and eager. He wanted to be gone.

“Kiss me once more,” she said.

He leaned out of the window and kissed her. The train started, and she stood on the wooden platform of the little station, waving her handkerchief till it was out of sight. Her heart was dreadfully heavy, and the few hundred yards to the vicarage seemed very, very long. It was natural enough that he should be eager to go, she thought, he was a boy and the future beckoned to him; but she—she clenched her teeth so that she should not cry. She uttered a little inward prayer that God would guard him, and keep him out of temptation, and give him happiness and good fortune.

But Philip ceased to think of her a moment after he had settled down in his carriage. He thought only of the future. He had written to Mrs. Otter, the massiere to whom Hayward had given him an introduction, and had in his pocket an invitation to tea on the following day. When he arrived in Paris he had his luggage put on a cab and trundled off slowly through the gay streets, over the bridge, and along the narrow ways of the Latin Quarter. He had taken a room at the Hotel des Deux Ecoles, which was in a shabby street off the Boulevard du Montparnasse; it was convenient for Amitrano’s School at which he was going to work. A waiter took his box up five flights of stairs, and Philip was shown into a tiny room, fusty from unopened windows, the greater part of which was taken up by a large wooden bed with a canopy over it of red rep; there were heavy curtains on the windows of the same dingy material; the chest of drawers served also as a washing-stand; and there was a massive wardrobe of the style which is connected with the good King Louis Philippe. The wall-paper was discoloured with age; it was dark gray, and there could be vaguely seen on it garlands of brown leaves. To Philip the room seemed quaint and charming.

Though it was late he felt too excited to sleep and, going out, made his way into the boulevard and walked towards the light. This led him to the station; and the square in front of it, vivid with arc-lamps, noisy with the yellow trams that seemed to cross it in all directions, made him laugh aloud with joy. There were cafes all round, and by chance, thirsty and eager to get a nearer sight of the crowd, Philip installed himself at a little table outside the Cafe de Versailles. Every other table was taken, for it was a fine night; and Philip looked curiously at the people, here little family groups, there a knot of men with odd-shaped hats and beards talking loudly and gesticulating; next to him were two men who looked like painters with women who Philip hoped were not their lawful wives; behind him he heard Americans loudly arguing on art. His soul was thrilled. He sat till very late, tired out but too happy to move, and when at last he went to bed he was wide awake; he listened to the manifold noise of Paris.

Next day about tea-time he made his way to the Lion de Belfort, and in a new street that led out of the Boulevard Raspail found Mrs. Otter. She was an insignificant woman of thirty, with a provincial air and a deliberately lady-like manner; she introduced him to her mother. He discovered presently that she had been studying in Paris for three years and later that she was separated from her husband. She had in her small drawing-room one or two portraits which she had painted, and to Philip’s inexperience they seemed extremely accomplished.

“I wonder if I shall ever be able to paint as well as that,” he said to her.

“Oh, I expect so,” she replied, not without self-satisfaction. “You can’t expect to do everything all at once, of course.”

She was very kind. She gave him the address of a shop where he could get a portfolio, drawing-paper, and charcoal.

“I shall be going to Amitrano’s about nine tomorrow, and if you’ll be there then I’ll see that you get a good place and all that sort of thing.”

She asked him what he wanted to do, and Philip felt that he should not let her see how vague he was about the whole matter.

“Well, first I want to learn to draw,” he said.

“I’m so glad to hear you say that. People always want to do things in such a hurry. I never touched oils till I’d been here for two years, and look at the result.”

She gave a glance at the portrait of her mother, a sticky piece of painting that hung over the piano.

“And if I were you, I would be very careful about the people you get to know. I wouldn’t mix myself up with any foreigners. I’m very careful myself.”

Philip thanked her for the suggestion, but it seemed to him odd. He did not know that he particularly wanted to be careful.

“We live just as we would if we were in England,” said Mrs. Otter’s mother, who till then had spoken little. “When we came here we brought all our own furniture over.”

Philip looked round the room. It was filled with a massive suite, and at the window were the same sort of white lace curtains which Aunt Louisa put up at the vicarage in summer. The piano was draped in Liberty silk and so was the chimney-piece. Mrs. Otter followed his wandering eye.

“In the evening when we close the shutters one might really feel one was in England.”

“And we have our meals just as if we were at home,” added her mother. “A meat breakfast in the morning and dinner in the middle of the day.”

When he left Mrs. Otter Philip went to buy drawing materials; and next morning at the stroke of nine, trying to seem self-assured, he presented himself at the school. Mrs. Otter was already there, and she came forward with a friendly smile. He had been anxious about the reception he would have as a nouveau, for he had read a good deal of the rough joking to which a newcomer was exposed at some of the studios; but Mrs. Otter had reassured him.

“Oh, there’s nothing like that here,” she said. “You see, about half our students are ladies, and they set a tone to the place.”

The studio was large and bare, with gray walls, on which were pinned the studies that had received prizes. A model was sitting in a chair with a loose wrap thrown over her, and about a dozen men and women were standing about, some talking and others still working on their sketch. It was the first rest of the model.

“You’d better not try anything too difficult at first,” said Mrs. Otter. “Put your easel here. You’ll find that’s the easiest pose.”

Philip placed an easel where she indicated, and Mrs. Otter introduced him to a young woman who sat next to him.

“Mr. Carey—Miss Price. Mr. Carey’s never studied before, you won’t mind helping him a little just at first will you?” Then she turned to the model. “La Pose.”

The model threw aside the paper she had been reading, La Petite Republique, and sulkily, throwing off her gown, got on to the stand. She stood, squarely on both feet with her hands clasped behind her head.

“It’s a stupid pose,” said Miss Price. “I can’t imagine why they chose it.”

When Philip entered, the people in the studio had looked at him curiously, and the model gave him an indifferent glance, but now they ceased to pay attention to him. Philip, with his beautiful sheet of paper in front of him, stared awkwardly at the model. He did not know how to begin. He had never seen a naked woman before. She was not young and her breasts were shrivelled. She had colourless, fair hair that fell over her forehead untidily, and her face was covered with large freckles. He glanced at Miss Price’s work. She had only been working on it two days, and it looked as though she had had trouble; her paper was in a mess from constant rubbing out, and to Philip’s eyes the figure looked strangely distorted.

“I should have thought I could do as well as that,” he said to himself.

He began on the head, thinking that he would work slowly downwards, but, he could not understand why, he found it infinitely more difficult to draw a head from the model than to draw one from his imagination. He got into difficulties. He glanced at Miss Price. She was working with vehement gravity. Her brow was wrinkled with eagerness, and there was an anxious look in her eyes. It was hot in the studio, and drops of sweat stood on her forehead. She was a girl of twenty-six, with a great deal of dull gold hair; it was handsome hair, but it was carelessly done, dragged back from her forehead and tied in a hurried knot. She had a large face, with broad, flat features and small eyes; her skin was pasty, with a singular unhealthiness of tone, and there was no colour in the cheeks. She had an unwashed air and you could not help wondering if she slept in her clothes. She was serious and silent. When the next pause came, she stepped back to look at her work.

“I don’t know why I’m having so much bother,” she said. “But I mean to get it right.” She turned to Philip. “How are you getting on?”

“Not at all,” he answered, with a rueful smile.

She looked at what he had done.

“You can’t expect to do anything that way. You must take measurements. And you must square out your paper.”

She showed him rapidly how to set about the business. Philip was impressed by her earnestness, but repelled by her want of charm. He was grateful for the hints she gave him and set to work again. Meanwhile other people had come in, mostly men, for the women always arrived first, and the studio for the time of year (it was early yet) was fairly full. Presently there came in a young man with thin, black hair, an enormous nose, and a face so long that it reminded you of a horse. He sat down next to Philip and nodded across him to Miss Price.

“You’re very late,” she said. “Are you only just up?”

“It was such a splendid day, I thought I’d lie in bed and think how beautiful it was out.”

Philip smiled, but Miss Price took the remark seriously.

“That seems a funny thing to do, I should have thought it would be more to the point to get up and enjoy it.”

“The way of the humorist is very hard,” said the young man gravely.

He did not seem inclined to work. He looked at his canvas; he was working in colour, and had sketched in the day before the model who was posing. He turned to Philip.

“Have you just come out from England?”

“Yes.”

“How did you find your way to Amitrano’s?”

“It was the only school I knew of.”

“I hope you haven’t come with the idea that you will learn anything here which will be of the smallest use to you.”

“It’s the best school in Paris,” said Miss Price. “It’s the only one where they take art seriously.”

“Should art be taken seriously?” the young man asked; and since Miss Price replied only with a scornful shrug, he added: “But the point is, all schools are bad. They are academical, obviously. Why this is less injurious than most is that the teaching is more incompetent than elsewhere. Because you learn nothing….”

“But why d’you come here then?” interrupted Philip.

“I see the better course, but do not follow it. Miss Price, who is cultured, will remember the Latin of that.”

“I wish you would leave me out of your conversation, Mr. Clutton,” said Miss Price brusquely.

“The only way to learn to paint,” he went on, imperturbable, “is to take a studio, hire a model, and just fight it out for yourself.”

“That seems a simple thing to do,” said Philip.

“It only needs money,” replied Clutton.

He began to paint, and Philip looked at him from the corner of his eye. He was long and desperately thin; his huge bones seemed to protrude from his body; his elbows were so sharp that they appeared to jut out through the arms of his shabby coat. His trousers were frayed at the bottom, and on each of his boots was a clumsy patch. Miss Price got up and went over to Philip’s easel.

“If Mr. Clutton will hold his tongue for a moment, I’ll just help you a little,” she said.

“Miss Price dislikes me because I have humour,” said Clutton, looking meditatively at his canvas, “but she detests me because I have genius.”

He spoke with solemnity, and his colossal, misshapen nose made what he said very quaint. Philip was obliged to laugh, but Miss Price grew darkly red with anger.

“You’re the only person who has ever accused you of genius.”

“Also I am the only person whose opinion is of the least value to me.”

Miss Price began to criticise what Philip had done. She talked glibly of anatomy and construction, planes and lines, and of much else which Philip did not understand. She had been at the studio a long time and knew the main points which the masters insisted upon, but though she could show what was wrong with Philip’s work she could not tell him how to put it right.

“It’s awfully kind of you to take so much trouble with me,” said Philip.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” she answered, flushing awkwardly. “People did the same for me when I first came, I’d do it for anyone.”

“Miss Price wants to indicate that she is giving you the advantage of her knowledge from a sense of duty rather than on account of any charms of your person,” said Clutton.

Miss Price gave him a furious look, and went back to her own drawing. The clock struck twelve, and the model with a cry of relief stepped down from the stand.

Miss Price gathered up her things.

“Some of us go to Gravier’s for lunch,” she said to Philip, with a look at Clutton. “I always go home myself.”

“I’ll take you to Gravier’s if you like,” said Clutton.

Philip thanked him and made ready to go. On his way out Mrs. Otter asked him how he had been getting on.

“Did Fanny Price help you?” she asked. “I put you there because I know she can do it if she likes. She’s a disagreeable, ill-natured girl, and she can’t draw herself at all, but she knows the ropes, and she can be useful to a newcomer if she cares to take the trouble.”

On the way down the street Clutton said to him:

“You’ve made an impression on Fanny Price. You’d better look out.”

Philip laughed. He had never seen anyone on whom he wished less to make an impression. They came to the cheap little restaurant at which several of the students ate, and Clutton sat down at a table at which three or four men were already seated. For a franc, they got an egg, a plate of meat, cheese, and a small bottle of wine. Coffee was extra. They sat on the pavement, and yellow trams passed up and down the boulevard with a ceaseless ringing of bells.

“By the way, what’s your name?” said Clutton, as they took their seats.

“Carey.”

“Allow me to introduce an old and trusted friend, Carey by name,” said Clutton gravely. “Mr. Flanagan, Mr. Lawson.”

They laughed and went on with their conversation. They talked of a thousand things, and they all talked at once. No one paid the smallest attention to anyone else. They talked of the places they had been to in the summer, of studios, of the various schools; they mentioned names which were unfamiliar to Philip, Monet, Manet, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas. Philip listened with all his ears, and though he felt a little out of it, his heart leaped with exultation. The time flew. When Clutton got up he said:

“I expect you’ll find me here this evening if you care to come. You’ll find this about the best place for getting dyspepsia at the lowest cost in the Quarter.”

XLI

Philip walked down the Boulevard du Montparnasse. It was not at all like the Paris he had seen in the spring during his visit to do the accounts of the Hotel St. Georges—he thought already of that part of his life with a shudder—but reminded him of what he thought a provincial town must be. There was an easy-going air about it, and a sunny spaciousness which invited the mind to day-dreaming. The trimness of the trees, the vivid whiteness of the houses, the breadth, were very agreeable; and he felt himself already thoroughly at home. He sauntered along, staring at the people; there seemed an elegance about the most ordinary, workmen with their broad red sashes and their wide trousers, little soldiers in dingy, charming uniforms. He came presently to the Avenue de l’Observatoire, and he gave a sigh of pleasure at the magnificent, yet so graceful, vista. He came to the gardens of the Luxembourg: children were playing, nurses with long ribbons walked slowly two by two, busy men passed through with satchels under their arms, youths strangely dressed. The scene was formal and dainty; nature was arranged and ordered, but so exquisitely, that nature unordered and unarranged seemed barbaric. Philip was enchanted. It excited him to stand on that spot of which he had read so much; it was classic ground to him; and he felt the awe and the delight which some old don might feel when for the first time he looked on the smiling plain of Sparta.

As he wandered he chanced to see Miss Price sitting by herself on a bench. He hesitated, for he did not at that moment want to see anyone, and her uncouth way seemed out of place amid the happiness he felt around him; but he had divined her sensitiveness to affront, and since she had seen him thought it would be polite to speak to her.

“What are you doing here?” she said, as he came up.

“Enjoying myself. Aren’t you?”

“Oh, I come here every day from four to five. I don’t think one does any good if one works straight through.”

“May I sit down for a minute?” he said.

“If you want to.”

“That doesn’t sound very cordial,” he laughed.

“I’m not much of a one for saying pretty things.”

Philip, a little disconcerted, was silent as he lit a cigarette.

“Did Clutton say anything about my work?” she asked suddenly.

“No, I don’t think he did,” said Philip.

“He’s no good, you know. He thinks he’s a genius, but he isn’t. He’s too lazy, for one thing. Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains. The only thing is to peg away. If one only makes up one’s mind badly enough to do a thing one can’t help doing it.”

She spoke with a passionate strenuousness which was rather striking. She wore a sailor hat of black straw, a white blouse which was not quite clean, and a brown skirt. She had no gloves on, and her hands wanted washing. She was so unattractive that Philip wished he had not begun to talk to her. He could not make out whether she wanted him to stay or go.

“I’ll do anything I can for you,” she said all at once, without reference to anything that had gone before. “I know how hard it is.”

“Thank you very much,” said Philip, then in a moment: “Won’t you come and have tea with me somewhere?”

She looked at him quickly and flushed. When she reddened her pasty skin acquired a curiously mottled look, like strawberries and cream that had gone bad.

“No, thanks. What d’you think I want tea for? I’ve only just had lunch.”

“I thought it would pass the time,” said Philip.

“If you find it long you needn’t bother about me, you know. I don’t mind being left alone.”

At that moment two men passed, in brown velveteens, enormous trousers, and basque caps. They were young, but both wore beards.

“I say, are those art-students?” said Philip. “They might have stepped out of the Vie de Boheme.”

“They’re Americans,” said Miss Price scornfully. “Frenchmen haven’t worn things like that for thirty years, but the Americans from the Far West buy those clothes and have themselves photographed the day after they arrive in Paris. That’s about as near to art as they ever get. But it doesn’t matter to them, they’ve all got money.”

Philip liked the daring picturesqueness of the Americans’ costume; he thought it showed the romantic spirit. Miss Price asked him the time.

“I must be getting along to the studio,” she said. “Are you going to the sketch classes?”

Philip did not know anything about them, and she told him that from five to six every evening a model sat, from whom anyone who liked could go and draw at the cost of fifty centimes. They had a different model every day, and it was very good practice.

“I don’t suppose you’re good enough yet for that. You’d better wait a bit.”

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t try. I haven’t got anything else to do.”

They got up and walked to the studio. Philip could not tell from her manner whether Miss Price wished him to walk with her or preferred to walk alone. He remained from sheer embarrassment, not knowing how to leave her; but she would not talk; she answered his questions in an ungracious manner.

A man was standing at the studio door with a large dish into which each person as he went in dropped his half franc. The studio was much fuller than it had been in the morning, and there was not the preponderance of English and Americans; nor were women there in so large a proportion. Philip felt the assemblage was more the sort of thing he had expected. It was very warm, and the air quickly grew fetid. It was an old man who sat this time, with a vast gray beard, and Philip tried to put into practice the little he had learned in the morning; but he made a poor job of it; he realised that he could not draw nearly as well as he thought. He glanced enviously at one or two sketches of men who sat near him, and wondered whether he would ever be able to use the charcoal with that mastery. The hour passed quickly. Not wishing to press himself upon Miss Price he sat down at some distance from her, and at the end, as he passed her on his way out, she asked him brusquely how he had got on.

“Not very well,” he smiled.

“If you’d condescended to come and sit near me I could have given you some hints. I suppose you thought yourself too grand.”

“No, it wasn’t that. I was afraid you’d think me a nuisance.”

“When I do that I’ll tell you sharp enough.”

Philip saw that in her uncouth way she was offering him help.

“Well, tomorrow I’ll just force myself upon you.”

“I don’t mind,” she answered.

Philip went out and wondered what he should do with himself till dinner. He was eager to do something characteristic. Absinthe! of course it was indicated, and so, sauntering towards the station, he seated himself outside a cafe and ordered it. He drank with nausea and satisfaction. He found the taste disgusting, but the moral effect magnificent; he felt every inch an art-student; and since he drank on an empty stomach his spirits presently grew very high. He watched the crowds, and felt all men were his brothers. He was happy. When he reached Gravier’s the table at which Clutton sat was full, but as soon as he saw Philip limping along he called out to him. They made room. The dinner was frugal, a plate of soup, a dish of meat, fruit, cheese, and half a bottle of wine; but Philip paid no attention to what he ate. He took note of the men at the table. Flanagan was there again: he was an American, a short, snub-nosed youth with a jolly face and a laughing mouth. He wore a Norfolk jacket of bold pattern, a blue stock round his neck, and a tweed cap of fantastic shape. At that time impressionism reigned in the Latin Quarter, but its victory over the older schools was still recent; and Carolus-Duran, Bouguereau, and their like were set up against Manet, Monet, and Degas. To appreciate these was still a sign of grace. Whistler was an influence strong with the English and his compatriots, and the discerning collected Japanese prints. The old masters were tested by new standards. The esteem in which Raphael had been for centuries held was a matter of derision to wise young men. They offered to give all his works for Velasquez’ head of Philip IV in the National Gallery. Philip found that a discussion on art was raging. Lawson, whom he had met at luncheon, sat opposite to him. He was a thin youth with a freckled face and red hair. He had very bright green eyes. As Philip sat down he fixed them on him and remarked suddenly:

“Raphael was only tolerable when he painted other people’s pictures. When he painted Peruginos or Pinturichios he was charming; when he painted Raphaels he was,” with a scornful shrug, “Raphael.”

Lawson spoke so aggressively that Philip was taken aback, but he was not obliged to answer because Flanagan broke in impatiently.

“Oh, to hell with art!” he cried. “Let’s get ginny.”

“You were ginny last night, Flanagan,” said Lawson.

“Nothing to what I mean to be tonight,” he answered. “Fancy being in Pa-ris and thinking of nothing but art all the time.” He spoke with a broad Western accent. “My, it is good to be alive.” He gathered himself together and then banged his fist on the table. “To hell with art, I say.”

“You not only say it, but you say it with tiresome iteration,” said Clutton severely.

There was another American at the table. He was dressed like those fine fellows whom Philip had seen that afternoon in the Luxembourg. He had a handsome face, thin, ascetic, with dark eyes; he wore his fantastic garb with the dashing air of a buccaneer. He had a vast quantity of dark hair which fell constantly over his eyes, and his most frequent gesture was to throw back his head dramatically to get some long wisp out of the way. He began to talk of the Olympia by Manet, which then hung in the Luxembourg.

“I stood in front of it for an hour today, and I tell you it’s not a good picture.”

Lawson put down his knife and fork. His green eyes flashed fire, he gasped with rage; but he could be seen imposing calm upon himself.

“It’s very interesting to hear the mind of the untutored savage,” he said. “Will you tell us why it isn’t a good picture?”

Before the American could answer someone else broke in vehemently.

“D’you mean to say you can look at the painting of that flesh and say it’s not good?”

“I don’t say that. I think the right breast is very well painted.”

“The right breast be damned,” shouted Lawson. “The whole thing’s a miracle of painting.”

He began to describe in detail the beauties of the picture, but at this table at Gravier’s they who spoke at length spoke for their own edification. No one listened to him. The American interrupted angrily.

“You don’t mean to say you think the head’s good?”

Lawson, white with passion now, began to defend the head; but Clutton, who had been sitting in silence with a look on his face of good-humoured scorn, broke in.

“Give him the head. We don’t want the head. It doesn’t affect the picture.”

“All right, I’ll give you the head,” cried Lawson. “Take the head and be damned to you.”

“What about the black line?” cried the American, triumphantly pushing back a wisp of hair which nearly fell in his soup. “You don’t see a black line round objects in nature.”

“Oh, God, send down fire from heaven to consume the blasphemer,” said Lawson. “What has nature got to do with it? No one knows what’s in nature and what isn’t! The world sees nature through the eyes of the artist. Why, for centuries it saw horses jumping a fence with all their legs extended, and by Heaven, sir, they were extended. It saw shadows black until Monet discovered they were coloured, and by Heaven, sir, they were black. If we choose to surround objects with a black line, the world will see the black line, and there will be a black line; and if we paint grass red and cows blue, it’ll see them red and blue, and, by Heaven, they will be red and blue.”

“To hell with art,” murmured Flanagan. “I want to get ginny.”

Lawson took no notice of the interruption.

“Now look here, when Olympia was shown at the Salon, Zola—amid the jeers of the Philistines and the hisses of the pompiers, the academicians, and the public, Zola said: ‘I look forward to the day when Manet’s picture will hang in the Louvre opposite the Odalisque of Ingres, and it will not be the Odalisque which will gain by comparison.’ It’ll be there. Every day I see the time grow nearer. In ten years the Olympia will be in the Louvre.”

“Never,” shouted the American, using both hands now with a sudden desperate attempt to get his hair once for all out of the way. “In ten years that picture will be dead. It’s only a fashion of the moment. No picture can live that hasn’t got something which that picture misses by a million miles.”

“And what is that?”

“Great art can’t exist without a moral element.”

“Oh God!” cried Lawson furiously. “I knew it was that. He wants morality.” He joined his hands and held them towards heaven in supplication. “Oh, Christopher Columbus, Christopher Columbus, what did you do when you discovered America?”

“Ruskin says…”

But before he could add another word, Clutton rapped with the handle of his knife imperiously on the table.

“Gentlemen,” he said in a stern voice, and his huge nose positively wrinkled with passion, “a name has been mentioned which I never thought to hear again in decent society. Freedom of speech is all very well, but we must observe the limits of common propriety. You may talk of Bouguereau if you will: there is a cheerful disgustingness in the sound which excites laughter; but let us not sully our chaste lips with the names of J. Ruskin, G. F. Watts, or E. B. Jones.”

“Who was Ruskin anyway?” asked Flanagan.

“He was one of the Great Victorians. He was a master of English style.”

“Ruskin’s style—a thing of shreds and purple patches,” said Lawson. “Besides, damn the Great Victorians. Whenever I open a paper and see Death of a Great Victorian, I thank Heaven there’s one more of them gone. Their only talent was longevity, and no artist should be allowed to live after he’s forty; by then a man has done his best work, all he does after that is repetition. Don’t you think it was the greatest luck in the world for them that Keats, Shelley, Bonnington, and Byron died early? What a genius we should think Swinburne if he had perished on the day the first series of Poems and Ballads was published!”

The suggestion pleased, for no one at the table was more than twenty-four, and they threw themselves upon it with gusto. They were unanimous for once. They elaborated. Someone proposed a vast bonfire made out of the works of the Forty Academicians into which the Great Victorians might be hurled on their fortieth birthday. The idea was received with acclamation. Carlyle and Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning, G. F. Watts, E. B. Jones, Dickens, Thackeray, they were hurried into the flames; Mr. Gladstone, John Bright, and Cobden; there was a moment’s discussion about George Meredith, but Matthew Arnold and Emerson were given up cheerfully. At last came Walter Pater.

“Not Walter Pater,” murmured Philip.

Lawson stared at him for a moment with his green eyes and then nodded.

“You’re quite right, Walter Pater is the only justification for Mona Lisa. D’you know Cronshaw? He used to know Pater.”

“Who’s Cronshaw?” asked Philip.

“Cronshaw’s a poet. He lives here. Let’s go to the Lilas.”

La Closerie des Lilas was a cafe to which they often went in the evening after dinner, and here Cronshaw was invariably to be found between the hours of nine at night and two in the morning. But Flanagan had had enough of intellectual conversation for one evening, and when Lawson made his suggestion, turned to Philip.

“Oh gee, let’s go where there are girls,” he said. “Come to the Gaite Montparnasse, and we’ll get ginny.”

“I’d rather go and see Cronshaw and keep sober,” laughed Philip.

XLII

There was a general disturbance. Flanagan and two or three more went on to the music-hall, while Philip walked slowly with Clutton and Lawson to the Closerie des Lilas.

“You must go to the Gaite Montparnasse,” said Lawson to him. “It’s one of the loveliest things in Paris. I’m going to paint it one of these days.”

Philip, influenced by Hayward, looked upon music-halls with scornful eyes, but he had reached Paris at a time when their artistic possibilities were just discovered. The peculiarities of lighting, the masses of dingy red and tarnished gold, the heaviness of the shadows and the decorative lines, offered a new theme; and half the studios in the Quarter contained sketches made in one or other of the local theatres. Men of letters, following in the painters’ wake, conspired suddenly to find artistic value in the turns; and red-nosed comedians were lauded to the skies for their sense of character; fat female singers, who had bawled obscurely for twenty years, were discovered to possess inimitable drollery; there were those who found an aesthetic delight in performing dogs; while others exhausted their vocabulary to extol the distinction of conjurers and trick-cyclists. The crowd too, under another influence, was become an object of sympathetic interest. With Hayward, Philip had disdained humanity in the mass; he adopted the attitude of one who wraps himself in solitariness and watches with disgust the antics of the vulgar; but Clutton and Lawson talked of the multitude with enthusiasm. They described the seething throng that filled the various fairs of Paris, the sea of faces, half seen in the glare of acetylene, half hidden in the darkness, and the blare of trumpets, the hooting of whistles, the hum of voices. What they said was new and strange to Philip. They told him about Cronshaw.

“Have you ever read any of his work?”

“No,” said Philip.

“It came out in The Yellow Book.”

They looked upon him, as painters often do writers, with contempt because he was a layman, with tolerance because he practised an art, and with awe because he used a medium in which themselves felt ill-at-ease.

“He’s an extraordinary fellow. You’ll find him a bit disappointing at first, he only comes out at his best when he’s drunk.”

“And the nuisance is,” added Clutton, “that it takes him a devil of a time to get drunk.”

When they arrived at the cafe Lawson told Philip that they would have to go in. There was hardly a bite in the autumn air, but Cronshaw had a morbid fear of draughts and even in the warmest weather sat inside.

“He knows everyone worth knowing,” Lawson explained. “He knew Pater and Oscar Wilde, and he knows Mallarme and all those fellows.”

The object of their search sat in the most sheltered corner of the cafe, with his coat on and the collar turned up. He wore his hat pressed well down on his forehead so that he should avoid cold air. He was a big man, stout but not obese, with a round face, a small moustache, and little, rather stupid eyes. His head did not seem quite big enough for his body. It looked like a pea uneasily poised on an egg. He was playing dominoes with a Frenchman, and greeted the new-comers with a quiet smile; he did not speak, but as if to make room for them pushed away the little pile of saucers on the table which indicated the number of drinks he had already consumed. He nodded to Philip when he was introduced to him, and went on with the game. Philip’s knowledge of the language was small, but he knew enough to tell that Cronshaw, although he had lived in Paris for several years, spoke French execrably.

At last he leaned back with a smile of triumph.

“Je vous ai battu,” he said, with an abominable accent. “Garcong!”

He called the waiter and turned to Philip.

“Just out from England? See any cricket?”

Philip was a little confused at the unexpected question.

“Cronshaw knows the averages of every first-class cricketer for the last twenty years,” said Lawson, smiling.

The Frenchman left them for friends at another table, and Cronshaw, with the lazy enunciation which was one of his peculiarities, began to discourse on the relative merits of Kent and Lancashire. He told them of the last test match he had seen and described the course of the game wicket by wicket.

“That’s the only thing I miss in Paris,” he said, as he finished the bock which the waiter had brought. “You don’t get any cricket.”

Philip was disappointed, and Lawson, pardonably anxious to show off one of the celebrities of the Quarter, grew impatient. Cronshaw was taking his time to wake up that evening, though the saucers at his side indicated that he had at least made an honest attempt to get drunk. Clutton watched the scene with amusement. He fancied there was something of affectation in Cronshaw’s minute knowledge of cricket; he liked to tantalise people by talking to them of things that obviously bored them; Clutton threw in a question.

“Have you seen Mallarme lately?”

Cronshaw looked at him slowly, as if he were turning the inquiry over in his mind, and before he answered rapped on the marble table with one of the saucers.

“Bring my bottle of whiskey,” he called out. He turned again to Philip. “I keep my own bottle of whiskey. I can’t afford to pay fifty centimes for every thimbleful.”

The waiter brought the bottle, and Cronshaw held it up to the light.

“They’ve been drinking it. Waiter, who’s been helping himself to my whiskey?”

“Mais personne, Monsieur Cronshaw.”

“I made a mark on it last night, and look at it.”

“Monsieur made a mark, but he kept on drinking after that. At that rate Monsieur wastes his time in making marks.”

The waiter was a jovial fellow and knew Cronshaw intimately. Cronshaw gazed at him.

“If you give me your word of honour as a nobleman and a gentleman that nobody but I has been drinking my whiskey, I’ll accept your statement.”

This remark, translated literally into the crudest French, sounded very funny, and the lady at the comptoir could not help laughing.

“Il est impayable,” she murmured.

Cronshaw, hearing her, turned a sheepish eye upon her; she was stout, matronly, and middle-aged; and solemnly kissed his hand to her. She shrugged her shoulders.

“Fear not, madam,” he said heavily. “I have passed the age when I am tempted by forty-five and gratitude.”

He poured himself out some whiskey and water, and slowly drank it. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“He talked very well.”

Lawson and Clutton knew that Cronshaw’s remark was an answer to the question about Mallarme. Cronshaw often went to the gatherings on Tuesday evenings when the poet received men of letters and painters, and discoursed with subtle oratory on any subject that was suggested to him. Cronshaw had evidently been there lately.

“He talked very well, but he talked nonsense. He talked about art as though it were the most important thing in the world.”

“If it isn’t, what are we here for?” asked Philip.

“What you’re here for I don’t know. It is no business of mine. But art is a luxury. Men attach importance only to self-preservation and the propagation of their species. It is only when these instincts are satisfied that they consent to occupy themselves with the entertainment which is provided for them by writers, painters, and poets.”

Cronshaw stopped for a moment to drink. He had pondered for twenty years the problem whether he loved liquor because it made him talk or whether he loved conversation because it made him thirsty.

Then he said: “I wrote a poem yesterday.”

Without being asked he began to recite it, very slowly, marking the rhythm with an extended forefinger. It was possibly a very fine poem, but at that moment a young woman came in. She had scarlet lips, and it was plain that the vivid colour of her cheeks was not due to the vulgarity of nature; she had blackened her eyelashes and eyebrows, and painted both eyelids a bold blue, which was continued to a triangle at the corner of the eyes. It was fantastic and amusing. Her dark hair was done over her ears in the fashion made popular by Mlle. Cleo de Merode. Philip’s eyes wandered to her, and Cronshaw, having finished the recitation of his verses, smiled upon him indulgently.

“You were not listening,” he said.

“Oh yes, I was.”

“I do not blame you, for you have given an apt illustration of the statement I just made. What is art beside love? I respect and applaud your indifference to fine poetry when you can contemplate the meretricious charms of this young person.”

She passed by the table at which they were sitting, and he took her arm.

“Come and sit by my side, dear child, and let us play the divine comedy of love.”

“Fichez-moi la paix,” she said, and pushing him on one side continued her perambulation.

“Art,” he continued, with a wave of the hand, “is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.”

Cronshaw filled his glass again, and began to talk at length. He spoke with rotund delivery. He chose his words carefully. He mingled wisdom and nonsense in the most astounding manner, gravely making fun of his hearers at one moment, and at the next playfully giving them sound advice. He talked of art, and literature, and life. He was by turns devout and obscene, merry and lachrymose. He grew remarkably drunk, and then he began to recite poetry, his own and Milton’s, his own and Shelley’s, his own and Kit Marlowe’s.

At last Lawson, exhausted, got up to go home.

“I shall go too,” said Philip.

Clutton, the most silent of them all, remained behind listening, with a sardonic smile on his lips, to Cronshaw’s maunderings. Lawson accompanied Philip to his hotel and then bade him good-night. But when Philip got to bed he could not sleep. All these new ideas that had been flung before him carelessly seethed in his brain. He was tremendously excited. He felt in himself great powers. He had never before been so self-confident.

“I know I shall be a great artist,” he said to himself. “I feel it in me.”

A thrill passed through him as another thought came, but even to himself he would not put it into words:

“By George, I believe I’ve got genius.”

He was in fact very drunk, but as he had not taken more than one glass of beer, it could have been due only to a more dangerous intoxicant than alcohol.