Of Human Bondage (50 page)

  The thing then was to discover what one was and
one's system of philosophy would devise itself. It seemed to Philip
that there were three things to find out: man's relation to the
world he lives in, man's relation with the men among whom he lives,
and finally man's relation to himself. He made an elaborate plan of
study.

  The advantage of living abroad is that, coming in
contact with the manners and customs of the people among whom you
live, you observe them from the outside and see that they have not
the necessity which those who practise them believe. You cannot
fail to discover that the beliefs which to you are self-evident to
the foreigner are absurd. The year in Germany, the long stay in
Paris, had prepared Philip to receive the sceptical teaching which
came to him now with such a feeling of relief. He saw that nothing
was good and nothing was evil; things were merely adapted to an
end. He read The Origin of Species. It seemed to offer an
explanation of much that troubled him. He was like an explorer now
who has reasoned that certain natural features must present
themselves, and, beating up a broad river, finds here the tributary
that he expected, there the fertile, populated plains, and further
on the mountains. When some great discovery is made the world is
surprised afterwards that it was not accepted at once, and even on
those who acknowledge its truth the effect is unimportant. The
first readers of The Origin of Species accepted it with their
reason; but their emotions, which are the ground of conduct, were
untouched. Philip was born a generation after this great book was
published, and much that horrified its contemporaries had passed
into the feeling of the time, so that he was able to accept it with
a joyful heart. He was intensely moved by the grandeur of the
struggle for life, and the ethical rule which it suggested seemed
to fit in with his predispositions. He said to himself that might
was right. Society stood on one side, an organism with its own laws
of growth and self-preservation, while the individual stood on the
other. The actions which were to the advantage of society it termed
virtuous and those which were not it called vicious. Good and evil
meant nothing more than that. Sin was a prejudice from which the
free man should rid himself. Society had three arms in its contest
with the individual, laws, public opinion, and conscience: the
first two could be met by guile, guile is the only weapon of the
weak against the strong: common opinion put the matter well when it
stated that sin consisted in being found out; but conscience was
the traitor within the gates; it fought in each heart the battle of
society, and caused the individual to throw himself, a wanton
sacrifice, to the prosperity of his enemy. For it was clear that
the two were irreconcilable, the state and the individual conscious
of himself. THAT uses the individual for its own ends, trampling
upon him if he thwarts it, rewarding him with medals, pensions,
honours, when he serves it faithfully; THIS, strong only in his
independence, threads his way through the state, for convenience'
sake, paying in money or service for certain benefits, but with no
sense of obligation; and, indifferent to the rewards, asks only to
be left alone. He is the independent traveller, who uses Cook's
tickets because they save trouble, but looks with good-humoured
contempt on the personally conducted parties. The free man can do
no wrong. He does everything he likes – if he can. His power is the
only measure of his morality. He recognises the laws of the state
and he can break them without sense of sin, but if he is punished
he accepts the punishment without rancour. Society has the
power.

  But if for the individual there was no right and no
wrong, then it seemed to Philip that conscience lost its power. It
was with a cry of triumph that he seized the knave and flung him
from his breast. But he was no nearer to the meaning of life than
he had been before. Why the world was there and what men had come
into existence for at all was as inexplicable as ever. Surely there
must be some reason. He thought of Cronshaw's parable of the
Persian carpet. He offered it as a solution of the riddle, and
mysteriously he stated that it was no answer at all unless you
found it out for yourself.

  "I wonder what the devil he meant," Philip
smiled.

  And so, on the last day of September, eager to put
into practice all these new theories of life, Philip, with sixteen
hundred pounds and his club-foot, set out for the second time to
London to make his third start in life.

  The examination Philip had passed before he was
articled to a chartered accountant was sufficient qualification for
him to enter a medical school. He chose St. Luke's because his
father had been a student there, and before the end of the summer
session had gone up to London for a day in order to see the
secretary. He got a list of rooms from him, and took lodgings in a
dingy house which had the advantage of being within two minutes'
walk of the hospital.

  "You'll have to arrange about a part to dissect,"
the secretary told him. "You'd better start on a leg; they
generally do; they seem to think it easier."

  Philip found that his first lecture was in anatomy,
at eleven, and about half past ten he limped across the road, and a
little nervously made his way to the Medical School. Just inside
the door a number of notices were pinned up, lists of lectures,
football fixtures, and the like; and these he looked at idly,
trying to seem at his ease. Young men and boys dribbled in and
looked for letters in the rack, chatted with one another, and
passed downstairs to the basement, in which was the student's
reading-room. Philip saw several fellows with a desultory, timid
look dawdling around, and surmised that, like himself, they were
there for the first time. When he had exhausted the notices he saw
a glass door which led into what was apparently a museum, and
having still twenty minutes to spare he walked in. It was a
collection of pathological specimens. Presently a boy of about
eighteen came up to him.

  "I say, are you first year?" he said.

  "Yes," answered Philip.

  "Where's the lecture room, d'you know? It's getting
on for eleven."

  "We'd better try to find it."

  They walked out of the museum into a long, dark
corridor, with the walls painted in two shades of red, and other
youths walking along suggested the way to them. They came to a door
marked Anatomy Theatre. Philip found that there were a good many
people already there. The seats were arranged in tiers, and just as
Philip entered an attendant came in, put a glass of water on the
table in the well of the lecture-room and then brought in a pelvis
and two thigh-bones, right and left. More men entered and took
their seats and by eleven the theatre was fairly full. There were
about sixty students. For the most part they were a good deal
younger than Philip, smooth-faced boys of eighteen, but there were
a few who were older than he: he noticed one tall man, with a
fierce red moustache, who might have been thirty; another little
fellow with black hair, only a year or two younger; and there was
one man with spectacles and a beard which was quite gray.

  The lecturer came in, Mr. Cameron, a handsome man
with white hair and clean-cut features. He called out the long list
of names. Then he made a little speech. He spoke in a pleasant
voice, with well-chosen words, and he seemed to take a discreet
pleasure in their careful arrangement. He suggested one or two
books which they might buy and advised the purchase of a skeleton.
He spoke of anatomy with enthusiasm: it was essential to the study
of surgery; a knowledge of it added to the appreciation of art.
Philip pricked up his ears. He heard later that Mr. Cameron
lectured also to the students at the Royal Academy. He had lived
many years in Japan, with a post at the University of Tokyo, and he
flattered himself on his appreciation of the beautiful.

  "You will have to learn many tedious things," he
finished, with an indulgent smile, "which you will forget the
moment you have passed your final examination, but in anatomy it is
better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at
all."

  He took up the pelvis which was lying on the table
and began to describe it. He spoke well and clearly.

  At the end of the lecture the boy who had spoken to
Philip in the pathological museum and sat next to him in the
theatre suggested that they should go to the dissecting-room.
Philip and he walked along the corridor again, and an attendant
told them where it was. As soon as they entered Philip understood
what the acrid smell was which he had noticed in the passage. He
lit a pipe. The attendant gave a short laugh.

  "You'll soon get used to the smell. I don't notice
it myself."

  He asked Philip's name and looked at a list on the
board.

  "You've got a leg – number four."

  Philip saw that another name was bracketed with his
own.

  "What's the meaning of that?" he asked.

  "We're very short of bodies just now. We've had to
put two on each part."

  The dissecting-room was a large apartment painted
like the corridors, the upper part a rich salmon and the dado a
dark terra-cotta. At regular intervals down the long sides of the
room, at right angles with the wall, were iron slabs, grooved like
meat-dishes; and on each lay a body. Most of them were men. They
were very dark from the preservative in which they had been kept,
and the skin had almost the look of leather. They were extremely
emaciated. The attendant took Philip up to one of the slabs. A
youth was standing by it.

  "Is your name Carey?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  "Oh, then we've got this leg together. It's lucky
it's a man, isn't it?"

  "Why?" asked Philip.

  "They generally always like a male better," said the
attendant. "A female's liable to have a lot of fat about her."

  Philip looked at the body. The arms and legs were so
thin that there was no shape in them, and the ribs stood out so
that the skin over them was tense. A man of about forty-five with a
thin, gray beard, and on his skull scanty, colourless hair: the
eyes were closed and the lower jaw sunken. Philip could not feel
that this had ever been a man, and yet in the row of them there was
something terrible and ghastly.

  "I thought I'd start at two," said the young man who
was dissecting with Philip.

  "All right, I'll be here then."

  He had bought the day before the case of instruments
which was needful, and now he was given a locker. He looked at the
boy who had accompanied him into the dissecting-room and saw that
he was white.

  "Make you feel rotten?" Philip asked him.

  "I've never seen anyone dead before."

  They walked along the corridor till they came to the
entrance of the school. Philip remembered Fanny Price. She was the
first dead person he had ever seen, and he remembered how strangely
it had affected him. There was an immeasurable distance between the
quick and the dead: they did not seem to belong to the same
species; and it was strange to think that but a little while before
they had spoken and moved and eaten and laughed. There was
something horrible about the dead, and you could imagine that they
might cast an evil influence on the living.

  "What d'you say to having something to eat?" said
his new friend to Philip.

  They went down into the basement, where there was a
dark room fitted up as a restaurant, and here the students were
able to get the same sort of fare as they might have at an aerated
bread shop. While they ate (Philip had a scone and butter and a cup
of chocolate), he discovered that his companion was called
Dunsford. He was a fresh-complexioned lad, with pleasant blue eyes
and curly, dark hair, large-limbed, slow of speech and movement. He
had just come from Clifton.