Of Human Bondage (18 page)

  Afterwards, when they had sat for a little on the
stiff green velvet chairs of the drawing-room, Fraulein Anna asked
Philip if he would like to go for a walk with them.

  Philip accepted the invitation. They were quite a
party. There were the two daughters of the Frau Professor, the two
other girls, one of the American students, and Philip. Philip
walked by the side of Anna and Fraulein Hedwig. He was a little
fluttered. He had never known any girls. At Blackstable there were
only the farmers' daughters and the girls of the local tradesmen.
He knew them by name and by sight, but he was timid, and he thought
they laughed at his deformity. He accepted willingly the difference
which the Vicar and Mrs. Carey put between their own exalted rank
and that of the farmers. The doctor had two daughters, but they
were both much older than Philip and had been married to successive
assistants while Philip was still a small boy. At school there had
been two or three girls of more boldness than modesty whom some of
the boys knew; and desperate stories, due in all probability to the
masculine imagination, were told of intrigues with them; but Philip
had always concealed under a lofty contempt the terror with which
they filled him. His imagination and the books he had read had
inspired in him a desire for the Byronic attitude; and he was torn
between a morbid self-consciousness and a conviction that he owed
it to himself to be gallant. He felt now that he should be bright
and amusing, but his brain seemed empty and he could not for the
life of him think of anything to say. Fraulein Anna, the Frau
Professor's daughter, addressed herself to him frequently from a
sense of duty, but the other said little: she looked at him now and
then with sparkling eyes, and sometimes to his confusion laughed
outright. Philip felt that she thought him perfectly ridiculous.
They walked along the side of a hill among pine-trees, and their
pleasant odour caused Philip a keen delight. The day was warm and
cloudless. At last they came to an eminence from which they saw the
valley of the Rhine spread out before them under the sun. It was a
vast stretch of country, sparkling with golden light, with cities
in the distance; and through it meandered the silver ribband of the
river. Wide spaces are rare in the corner of Kent which Philip
knew, the sea offers the only broad horizon, and the immense
distance he saw now gave him a peculiar, an indescribable thrill.
He felt suddenly elated. Though he did not know it, it was the
first time that he had experienced, quite undiluted with foreign
emotions, the sense of beauty. They sat on a bench, the three of
them, for the others had gone on, and while the girls talked in
rapid German, Philip, indifferent to their proximity, feasted his
eyes.

  "By Jove, I am happy," he said to himself
unconsciously.

  Philip thought occasionally of the King's School at
Tercanbury, and laughed to himself as he remembered what at some
particular moment of the day they were doing. Now and then he
dreamed that he was there still, and it gave him an extraordinary
satisfaction, on awaking, to realise that he was in his little room
in the turret. From his bed he could see the great cumulus clouds
that hung in the blue sky. He revelled in his freedom. He could go
to bed when he chose and get up when the fancy took him. There was
no one to order him about. It struck him that he need not tell any
more lies.

  It had been arranged that Professor Erlin should
teach him Latin and German; a Frenchman came every day to give him
lessons in French; and the Frau Professor had recommended for
mathematics an Englishman who was taking a philological degree at
the university. This was a man named Wharton. Philip went to him
every morning. He lived in one room on the top floor of a shabby
house. It was dirty and untidy, and it was filled with a pungent
odour made up of many different stinks. He was generally in bed
when Philip arrived at ten o'clock, and he jumped out, put on a
filthy dressing-gown and felt slippers, and, while he gave
instruction, ate his simple breakfast. He was a short man, stout
from excessive beer drinking, with a heavy moustache and long,
unkempt hair. He had been in Germany for five years and was become
very Teutonic. He spoke with scorn of Cambridge where he had taken
his degree and with horror of the life which awaited him when,
having taken his doctorate in Heidelberg, he must return to England
and a pedagogic career. He adored the life of the German university
with its happy freedom and its jolly companionships. He was a
member of a Burschenschaft, and promised to take Philip to a
Kneipe. He was very poor and made no secret that the lessons he was
giving Philip meant the difference between meat for his dinner and
bread and cheese. Sometimes after a heavy night he had such a
headache that he could not drink his coffee, and he gave his lesson
with heaviness of spirit. For these occasions he kept a few bottles
of beer under the bed, and one of these and a pipe would help him
to bear the burden of life.

  "A hair of the dog that bit him," he would say as he
poured out the beer, carefully so that the foam should not make him
wait too long to drink.

  Then he would talk to Philip of the university, the
quarrels between rival corps, the duels, and the merits of this and
that professor. Philip learnt more of life from him than of
mathematics. Sometimes Wharton would sit back with a laugh and
say:

  "Look here, we've not done anything today. You
needn't pay me for the lesson."

  "Oh, it doesn't matter," said Philip.

  This was something new and very interesting, and he
felt that it was of greater import than trigonometry, which he
never could understand. It was like a window on life that he had a
chance of peeping through, and he looked with a wildly beating
heart.

  "No, you can keep your dirty money," said
Wharton.

  "But how about your dinner?" said Philip, with a
smile, for he knew exactly how his master's finances stood.

  Wharton had even asked him to pay him the two
shillings which the lesson cost once a week rather than once a
month, since it made things less complicated.

  "Oh, never mind my dinner. It won't be the first
time I've dined off a bottle of beer, and my mind's never clearer
than when I do."

  He dived under the bed (the sheets were gray with
want of washing), and fished out another bottle. Philip, who was
young and did not know the good things of life, refused to share it
with him, so he drank alone.

  "How long are you going to stay here?" asked
Wharton.

  Both he and Philip had given up with relief the
pretence of mathematics.

  "Oh, I don't know. I suppose about a year. Then my
people want me to go to Oxford."

  Wharton gave a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders.
It was a new experience for Philip to learn that there were persons
who did not look upon that seat of learning with awe.

  "What d'you want to go there for? You'll only be a
glorified schoolboy. Why don't you matriculate here? A year's no
good. Spend five years here. You know, there are two good things in
life, freedom of thought and freedom of action. In France you get
freedom of action: you can do what you like and nobody bothers, but
you must think like everybody else. In Germany you must do what
everybody else does, but you may think as you choose. They're both
very good things. I personally prefer freedom of thought. But in
England you get neither: you're ground down by convention. You
can't think as you like and you can't act as you like. That's
because it's a democratic nation. I expect America's worse."

  He leaned back cautiously, for the chair on which he
sat had a ricketty leg, and it was disconcerting when a rhetorical
flourish was interrupted by a sudden fall to the floor.

  "I ought to go back to England this year, but if I
can scrape together enough to keep body and soul on speaking terms
I shall stay another twelve months. But then I shall have to go.
And I must leave all this" – he waved his arm round the dirty
garret, with its unmade bed, the clothes lying on the floor, a row
of empty beer bottles against the wall, piles of unbound, ragged
books in every corner – "for some provincial university where I
shall try and get a chair of philology. And I shall play tennis and
go to tea-parties." He interrupted himself and gave Philip, very
neatly dressed, with a clean collar on and his hair well-brushed, a
quizzical look. "And, my God! I shall have to wash."

  Philip reddened, feeling his own spruceness an
intolerable reproach; for of late he had begun to pay some
attention to his toilet, and he had come out from England with a
pretty selection of ties.

  The summer came upon the country like a conqueror.
Each day was beautiful. The sky had an arrogant blue which goaded
the nerves like a spur. The green of the trees in the Anlage was
violent and crude; and the houses, when the sun caught them, had a
dazzling white which stimulated till it hurt. Sometimes on his way
back from Wharton Philip would sit in the shade on one of the
benches in the Anlage, enjoying the coolness and watching the
patterns of light which the sun, shining through the leaves, made
on the ground. His soul danced with delight as gaily as the
sunbeams. He revelled in those moments of idleness stolen from his
work. Sometimes he sauntered through the streets of the old town.
He looked with awe at the students of the corps, their cheeks
gashed and red, who swaggered about in their coloured caps. In the
afternoons he wandered about the hills with the girls in the Frau
Professor's house, and sometimes they went up the river and had tea
in a leafy beer-garden. In the evenings they walked round and round
the Stadtgarten, listening to the band.

  Philip soon learned the various interests of the
household. Fraulein Thekla, the professor's elder daughter, was
engaged to a man in England who had spent twelve months in the
house to learn German, and their marriage was to take place at the
end of the year. But the young man wrote that his father, an
india-rubber merchant who lived in Slough, did not approve of the
union, and Fraulein Thekla was often in tears. Sometimes she and
her mother might be seen, with stern eyes and determined mouths,
looking over the letters of the reluctant lover. Thekla painted in
water colour, and occasionally she and Philip, with another of the
girls to keep them company, would go out and paint little pictures.
The pretty Fraulein Hedwig had amorous troubles too. She was the
daughter of a merchant in Berlin and a dashing hussar had fallen in
love with her, a von if you please: but his parents opposed a
marriage with a person of her condition, and she had been sent to
Heidelberg to forget him. She could never, never do this, and
corresponded with him continually, and he was making every effort
to induce an exasperating father to change his mind. She told all
this to Philip with pretty sighs and becoming blushes, and showed
him the photograph of the gay lieutenant. Philip liked her best of
all the girls at the Frau Professor's, and on their walks always
tried to get by her side. He blushed a great deal when the others
chaffed him for his obvious preference. He made the first
declaration in his life to Fraulein Hedwig, but unfortunately it
was an accident, and it happened in this manner. In the evenings
when they did not go out, the young women sang little songs in the
green velvet drawing-room, while Fraulein Anna, who always made
herself useful, industriously accompanied. Fraulein Hedwig's
favourite song was called Ich liebe dich, I love you; and one
evening after she had sung this, when Philip was standing with her
on the balcony, looking at the stars, it occurred to him to make
some remark about it. He began:

  "Ich liebe dich."

  His German was halting, and he looked about for the
word he wanted. The pause was infinitesimal, but before he could go
on Fraulein Hedwig said: