Of Human Bondage (43 page)

  "Hail, daughter of Herodias," cried Cronshaw.

  The mutton was eaten with gusto, and it did one good
to see what a hearty appetite the pale-faced lady had. Clutton and
Potter sat on each side of her, and everyone knew that neither had
found her unduly coy. She grew tired of most people in six weeks,
but she knew exactly how to treat afterwards the gentlemen who had
laid their young hearts at her feet. She bore them no ill-will,
though having loved them she had ceased to do so, and treated them
with friendliness but without familiarity. Now and then she looked
at Lawson with melancholy eyes. The poires flambees were a great
success, partly because of the brandy, and partly because Miss
Chalice insisted that they should be eaten with the cheese.

  "I don't know whether it's perfectly delicious, or
whether I'm just going to vomit," she said, after she had
thoroughly tried the mixture.

  Coffee and cognac followed with sufficient speed to
prevent any untoward consequence, and they settled down to smoke in
comfort. Ruth Chalice, who could do nothing that was not
deliberately artistic, arranged herself in a graceful attitude by
Cronshaw and just rested her exquisite head on his shoulder. She
looked into the dark abyss of time with brooding eyes, and now and
then with a long meditative glance at Lawson she sighed deeply.

  Then came the summer, and restlessness seized these
young people. The blue skies lured them to the sea, and the
pleasant breeze sighing through the leaves of the plane-trees on
the boulevard drew them towards the country. Everyone made plans
for leaving Paris; they discussed what was the most suitable size
for the canvases they meant to take; they laid in stores of panels
for sketching; they argued about the merits of various places in
Brittany. Flanagan and Potter went to Concarneau; Mrs. Otter and
her mother, with a natural instinct for the obvious, went to
Pont-Aven; Philip and Lawson made up their minds to go to the
forest of Fontainebleau, and Miss Chalice knew of a very good hotel
at Moret where there was lots of stuff to paint; it was near Paris,
and neither Philip nor Lawson was indifferent to the railway fare.
Ruth Chalice would be there, and Lawson had an idea for a portrait
of her in the open air. Just then the Salon was full of portraits
of people in gardens, in sunlight, with blinking eyes and green
reflections of sunlit leaves on their faces. They asked Clutton to
go with them, but he preferred spending the summer by himself. He
had just discovered Cezanne, and was uger to go to Provence; he
wanted heavy skies from which the hot blue seemed to drip like
beads of sweat, and broad white dusty roads, and pale roofs out of
which the sun had burnt the colour, and olive trees gray with
heat.

  The day before they were to start, after the morning
class, Philip, putting his things together, spoke to Fanny
Price.

  "I'm off tomorrow," he said cheerfully.

  "Off where?" she said quickly. "You're not going
away?" Her face fell.

  "I'm going away for the summer. Aren't you?"

  "No, I'm staying in Paris. I thought you were going
to stay too. I was looking forward...."

  She stopped and shrugged her shoulders.

  "But won't it be frightfully hot here? It's awfully
bad for you."

  "Much you care if it's bad for me. Where are you
going?"

  "Moret."

  "Chalice is going there. You're not going with
her?"

  "Lawson and I are going. And she's going there too.
I don't know that we're actually going together."

  She gave a low guttural sound, and her large face
grew dark and red.

  "How filthy! I thought you were a decent fellow. You
were about the only one here. She's been with Clutton and Potter
and Flanagan, even with old Foinet – that's why he takes so much
trouble about her – and now two of you, you and Lawson. It makes me
sick."

  "Oh, what nonsense! She's a very decent sort. One
treats her just as if she were a man."

  "Oh, don't speak to me, don't speak to me."

  "But what can it matter to you?" asked Philip. "It's
really no business of yours where I spend my summer."

  "I was looking forward to it so much," she gasped,
speaking it seemed almost to herself. "I didn't think you had the
money to go away, and there wouldn't have been anyone else here,
and we could have worked together, and we'd have gone to see
things." Then her thoughts flung back to Ruth Chalice. "The filthy
beast," she cried. "She isn't fit to speak to."

  Philip looked at her with a sinking heart. He was
not a man to think girls were in love with him; he was too
conscious of his deformity, and he felt awkward and clumsy with
women; but he did not know what else this outburst could mean.
Fanny Price, in the dirty brown dress, with her hair falling over
her face, sloppy, untidy, stood before him; and tears of anger
rolled down her cheeks. She was repellent. Philip glanced at the
door, instinctively hoping that someone would come in and put an
end to the scene.

  "I'm awfully sorry," he said.

  "You're just the same as all of them. You take all
you can get, and you don't even say thank you. I've taught you
everything you know. No one else would take any trouble with you.
Has Foinet ever bothered about you? And I can tell you this – you
can work here for a thousand years and you'll never do any good.
You haven't got any talent. You haven't got any originality. And
it's not only me – they all say it. You'll never be a painter as
long as you live."

  "That is no business of yours either, is it?" said
Philip, flushing.

  "Oh, you think it's only my temper. Ask Clutton, ask
Lawson, ask Chalice. Never, never, never. You haven't got it in
you."

  Philip shrugged his shoulders and walked out. She
shouted after him.

  "Never, never, never."

  Moret was in those days an old-fashioned town of one
street at the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, and the Ecu d'Or
was a hotel which still had about it the decrepit air of the Ancien
Regime. It faced the winding river, the Loing; and Miss Chalice had
a room with a little terrace overlooking it, with a charming view
of the old bridge and its fortified gateway. They sat here in the
evenings after dinner, drinking coffee, smoking, and discussing
art. There ran into the river, a little way off, a narrow canal
bordered by poplars, and along the banks of this after their day's
work they often wandered. They spent all day painting. Like most of
their generation they were obsessed by the fear of the picturesque,
and they turned their backs on the obvious beauty of the town to
seek subjects which were devoid of a prettiness they despised.
Sisley and Monet had painted the canal with its poplars, and they
felt a desire to try their hands at what was so typical of France;
but they were frightened of its formal beauty, and set themselves
deliberately to avoid it. Miss Chalice, who had a clever dexterity
which impressed Lawson notwithstanding his contempt for feminine
art, started a picture in which she tried to circumvent the
commonplace by leaving out the tops of the trees; and Lawson had
the brilliant idea of putting in his foreground a large blue
advertisement of chocolat Menier in order to emphasise his
abhorrence of the chocolate box.

  Philip began now to paint in oils. He experienced a
thrill of delight when first he used that grateful medium. He went
out with Lawson in the morning with his little box and sat by him
painting a panel; it gave him so much satisfaction that he did not
realise he was doing no more than copy; he was so much under his
friend's influence that he saw only with his eyes. Lawson painted
very low in tone, and they both saw the emerald of the grass like
dark velvet, while the brilliance of the sky turned in their hands
to a brooding ultramarine. Through July they had one fine day after
another; it was very hot; and the heat, searing Philip's heart,
filled him with languor; he could not work; his mind was eager with
a thousand thoughts. Often he spent the mornings by the side of the
canal in the shade of the poplars, reading a few lines and then
dreaming for half an hour. Sometimes he hired a rickety bicycle and
rode along the dusty road that led to the forest, and then lay down
in a clearing. His head was full of romantic fancies. The ladies of
Watteau, gay and insouciant, seemed to wander with their cavaliers
among the great trees, whispering to one another careless, charming
things, and yet somehow oppressed by a nameless fear.

  They were alone in the hotel but for a fat
Frenchwoman of middle age, a Rabelaisian figure with a broad,
obscene laugh. She spent the day by the river patiently fishing for
fish she never caught, and Philip sometimes went down and talked to
her. He found out that she had belonged to a profession whose most
notorious member for our generation was Mrs. Warren, and having
made a competence she now lived the quiet life of the bourgeoise.
She told Philip lewd stories.

  "You must go to Seville," she said – she spoke a
little broken English. "The most beautiful women in the world."

  She leered and nodded her head. Her triple chin, her
large belly, shook with inward laughter.

  It grew so hot that it was almost impossible to
sleep at night. The heat seemed to linger under the trees as though
it were a material thing. They did not wish to leave the starlit
night, and the three of them would sit on the terrace of Ruth
Chalice's room, silent, hour after hour, too tired to talk any
more, but in voluptuous enjoyment of the stillness. They listened
to the murmur of the river. The church clock struck one and two and
sometimes three before they could drag themselves to bed. Suddenly
Philip became aware that Ruth Chalice and Lawson were lovers. He
divined it in the way the girl looked at the young painter, and in
his air of possession; and as Philip sat with them he felt a kind
of effluence surrounding them, as though the air were heavy with
something strange. The revelation was a shock. He had looked upon
Miss Chalice as a very good fellow and he liked to talk to her, but
it had never seemed to him possible to enter into a closer
relationship. One Sunday they had all gone with a tea-basket into
the forest, and when they came to a glade which was suitably
sylvan, Miss Chalice, because it was idyllic, insisted on taking
off her shoes and stockings. It would have been very charming only
her feet were rather large and she had on both a large corn on the
third toe. Philip felt it made her proceeding a little ridiculous.
But now he looked upon her quite differently; there was something
softly feminine in her large eyes and her olive skin; he felt
himself a fool not to have seen that she was attractive. He thought
he detected in her a touch of contempt for him, because he had not
had the sense to see that she was there, in his way, and in Lawson
a suspicion of superiority. He was envious of Lawson, and he was
jealous, not of the individual concerned, but of his love. He
wished that he was standing in his shoes and feeling with his
heart. He was troubled, and the fear seized him that love would
pass him by. He wanted a passion to seize him, he wanted to be
swept off his feet and borne powerless in a mighty rush he cared
not whither. Miss Chalice and Lawson seemed to him now somehow
different, and the constant companionship with them made him
restless. He was dissatisfied with himself. Life was not giving him
what he wanted, and he had an uneasy feeling that he was losing his
time.

  The stout Frenchwoman soon guessed what the
relations were between the couple, and talked of the matter to
Philip with the utmost frankness.

  "And you," she said, with the tolerant smile of one
who had fattened on the lust of her fellows, "have you got a petite
amie?"

  "No," said Philip, blushing.

  "And why not? C'est de votre age."

  He shrugged his shoulders. He had a volume of
Verlaine in his hands, and he wandered off. He tried to read, but
his passion was too strong. He thought of the stray amours to which
he had been introduced by Flanagan, the sly visits to houses in a
cul-de-sac, with the drawing-room in Utrecht velvet, and the
mercenary graces of painted women. He shuddered. He threw himself
on the grass, stretching his limbs like a young animal freshly
awaked from sleep; and the rippling water, the poplars gently
tremulous in the faint breeze, the blue sky, were almost more than
he could bear. He was in love with love. In his fancy he felt the
kiss of warm lips on his, and around his neck the touch of soft
hands. He imagined himself in the arms of Ruth Chalice, he thought
of her dark eyes and the wonderful texture of her skin; he was mad
to have let such a wonderful adventure slip through his fingers.
And if Lawson had done it why should not he? But this was only when
he did not see her, when he lay awake at night or dreamed idly by
the side of the canal; when he saw her he felt suddenly quite
different; he had no desire to take her in his arms, and he could
not imagine himself kissing her. It was very curious. Away from her
he thought her beautiful, remembering only her magnificent eyes and
the creamy pallor of her face; but when he was with her he saw only
that she was flat-chested and that her teeth were slightly decayed;
he could not forget the corns on her toes. He could not understand
himself. Would he always love only in absence and be prevented from
enjoying anything when he had the chance by that deformity of
vision which seemed to exaggerate the revolting?

  He was not sorry when a change in the weather,
announcing the definite end of the long summer, drove them all back
to Paris.