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CHAPTER 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 feat
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.


CHAPTER 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_.


CHAPTER 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."


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER 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 nut, 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.


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER 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 Loudon. 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."


CHAPTER 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
Haunted 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."


CHAPTER 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 Montparuasse; 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 comer 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 it 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."


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER XLIII

ON TUESDAYS and Fridays masters spent the morning at Amitrano's,
criticising the work done. In France the painter earns little
unless he paints portraits and is patronised by rich Americans;
and men of reputation are glad to increase their incomes by
spending two or three hours once a week at one of the numerous
studios where art is taught. Tuesday was the day upon which
Michel Rollin came to Amitrano's. He was an elderly man, with a
white beard and a florid complexion, who had painted a number of
decorations for the State, but these were an object of derision
to the students he instructed: he was a disciple of Ingres,
impervious to the progress of art and angrily impatient with
that _tas de farceurs_ whose names were Manet, Degas, Monet,
and Sisley; but he was an excellent teacher, helpful, polite,
and encouraging. Foinet, on the other hand, who visited the
studio on Fridays, was a difficult man to get on with. He was a
small, shrivelled person, with bad teeth and a bilious air, an
untidy gray beard, and savage eyes; his voice was high and his
tone sarcastic. He had had pictures bought by the Luxembourg,
and at twenty-five looked forward to a great career; but his
talent was due to youth rather than to personality, and for
twenty years he had done nothing but repeat the landscape which
had brought him his early success. When he was reproached with
monotony, he answered:

"Corot only painted one thing. Why shouldn't I?"

He was envious of everyone else's success, and had a peculiar,
personal loathing of the impressionists; for he looked upon his
own failure as due to the mad fashion which had attracted the
public, _sale bete_, to their works. The genial disdain of
Michel Rollin, who called them impostors, was answered by him
with vituperation, of which _crapule_ and _canaille_ were
the least violent items; he amused himself with abuse of their
private lives, and with sardonic humour, with blasphemous and
obscene detail, attacked the legitimacy of their births and the
purity of their conjugal relations: he used an Oriental imagery
and an Oriental emphasis to accentuate his ribald scorn. Nor did
he conceal his contempt for the students whose work he examined.
By them he was hated and feared; the women by his brutal sarcasm
he reduced often to tears, which again aroused his ridicule; and
he remained at the studio, notwithstanding the protests of those
who suffered too bitterly from his attacks, because there could
be no doubt that he was one of the best masters in Paris.
Sometimes the old model who kept the school ventured to
remonstrate with him, but his expostulations quickly gave way
before the violent insolence of the painter to abject apologies.

It was Foinet with whom Philip first came in contact. He was
already in the studio when Philip arrived. He went round from
easel to easel, with Mrs. Otter, the _massiere_, by his side
to interpret his remarks for the benefit of those who could not
understand French. Fanny Price, sitting next to Philip, was
working feverishly. Her face was sallow with nervousness, and
every now and then she stopped to wipe her hands on her blouse;
for they were hot with anxiety. Suddenly she turned to Philip
with an anxious look, which she tried to hide by a sullen frown.

"D'you think it's good?" she asked, nodding at her drawing.

Philip got up and looked at it. He was astounded; he felt she
must have no eye at all; the thing was hopelessly out of
drawing.

"I wish I could draw half as well myself," he answered.

"You can't expect to, you've only just come. It's a bit too much
to expect that you should draw as well as I do. I've been here
two years."

Fanny Price puzzled Philip. Her conceit was stupendous. Philip
had already discovered that everyone in the studio cordially
disliked her; and it was no wonder, for she seemed to go out of
her way to wound people.

"I complained to Mrs. Otter about Foinet," she said now. "The
last two weeks he hasn't looked at my drawings. He spends about
half an hour on Mrs. Otter because she's the _massiere_. After
all I pay as much as anybody else, and I suppose my money's as
good as theirs. I don't see why I shouldn't get as much
attention as anybody else."

She took up her charcoal again, but in a moment put it down with
a groan.

"I can't do any more now. I'm so frightfully nervous."

She looked at Foinet, who was coming towards them with Mrs.
Otter. Mrs. Otter, meek, mediocre, and self-satisfied, wore an
air of importance. Foinet sat down at the easel of an untidy
little Englishwoman called Ruth Chalice. She had the fine black
eyes, languid but passionate, the thin face, ascetic but
sensual, the skin like old ivory, which under the influence of
Burne-Jones were cultivated at that time by young ladies in
Chelsea. Foinet seemed in a pleasant mood; he did not say much
to her, but with quick, determined strokes of her charcoal
pointed out her errors. Miss Chalice beamed with pleasure when
he rose. He came to Clutton, and by this time Philip was nervous
too but Mrs. Otter had promised to make things easy for him.
Foinet stood for a moment in front of Clutton's work, biting his
thumb silently, then absent-mindedly spat out upon the canvas
the little piece of skin which he had bitten off.

"That's a fine line," he said at last, indicating with his thumb
what pleased him. "You're beginning to learn to draw."

Clutton did not answer, but looked at the master with his usual
air of sardonic indifference to the world's opinion.

"I'm beginning to think you have at least a trace of talent."

Mrs. Otter, who did not like Clutton, pursed her lips. She did
not see anything out of the way in his work. Foinet sat down and
went into technical details. Mrs. Otter grew rather tired of
standing. Clutton did not say anything, but nodded now and then,
and Foinet felt with satisfaction that he grasped what he said
and the reasons of it; most of them listened to him, but it was
clear they never understood. Then Foinet got up and came to
Philip.

"He only arrived two days ago," Mrs. Otter hurried to explain.
"He's a beginner. He's never studied before."

"_Ca se voit_," the master said. "One sees that."

He passed on, and Mrs. Otter murmured to him:

"This is the young lady I told you about."

He looked at her as though she were some repulsive animal, and
his voice grew more rasping.

"It appears that you do not think I pay enough attention to you.
You have been complaining to the _massiere_. Well, show me
this work to which you wish me to give attention."

Fanny Price coloured. The blood under her unhealthy skin seemed
to be of a strange purple. Without answering she pointed to the
drawing on which she had been at work since the beginning of the
week. Foinet sat down.

"Well, what do you wish me to say to you? Do you wish me to tell
you it is good? It isn't. Do you wish me to tell you it is well
drawn? It isn't. Do you wish me to say it has merit? It hasn't.
Do you wish me to show you what is wrong with it? It is all
wrong. Do you wish me to tell you what to do with it? Tear it
up. Are you satisfied now?"

Miss Price became very white. She was furious because he had
said all this before Mrs. Otter. Though she had been in France
so long and could understand French well enough, she could
hardly speak two words.

"He's got no right to treat me like that. My money's as good as
anyone else's. I pay him to teach me. That's not teaching me."

"What does she say? What does she say?" asked Foinet.

Mrs. Otter hesitated to translate, and Miss Price repeated in
execrable French.

"_Je vous paye Pour m'apprendre_."

His eyes flashed with rage, he raised his voice and shook his
fist.

"_Mais, nom de Dieu_, I can't teach you. I could more easily
teach a camel." He turned to Mrs. Otter. "Ask her, does she do
this for amusement, or does she expect to earn money by it?"

"I'm going to earn my living as an artist," Miss Price answered.

"Then it is my duty to tell you that you are wasting your time.
It would not matter that you have no talent, talent does not run
about the streets in these days, but you have not the beginning
of an aptitude. How long have you been here? A child of five
after two lessons would draw better than you do. I only say one
thing to you, give up this hopeless attempt. You're more likely
to earn your living as a _bonne a tout faire_ than as a
painter. Look."

He seized a piece of charcoal, and it broke as he applied it to
the paper. He cursed, and with the stump drew great firm lines.
He drew rapidly and spoke at the same time, spitting out the
words with venom.

"Look, those arms are not the same length. That knee, it's
grotesque. I tell you a child of five. You see, she's not
standing on her legs. That foot!"

With each word the angry pencil made a mark, and in a moment the
drawing upon which Fanny Price had spent so much time and eager
trouble was unrecognisable, a confusion of lines and smudges. At
last he flung down the charcoal and stood up.

"Take my advice, Mademoiselle, try dressmaking." He looked at
his watch. "It's twelve. _A la semaine Prochaine, messieurs_."

Miss Price gathered up her things slowly. Philip waited behind
after the others to say to her something consolatory. He could
think of nothing but:

"I say, I'm awfully sorry. What a beast that man is!"

She turned on him savagely.

"Is that what you're waiting about for? When I want your
sympathy I'll ask for it. Please get out of my way."

She walked past him, out of the studio, and Philip, with a shrug
of the shoulders, limped along to Gravier's for luncheon.

"It served her right," said Lawson, when Philip told him what
had happened. "Ill-tempered slut."

Lawson was very sensitive to criticism and, in order to avoid
it, never went to the studio when Foinet was coming.

"I don't want other people's opinion of my work," he said. "I
know myself if it's good or bad."

"You mean you don't want other people's bad opinion of your
work," answered Clutton dryly.

In the afternoon Philip thought he would go to the Luxembourg to
see the pictures, and walking through the garden he saw Fanny
Price sitting in her accustomed seat. He was sore at the
rudeness with which she had met his well-meant attempt to say
something pleasant, and passed as though he had not caught sight
of her. But she got up at once and came towards him.

"Are you trying to cut me?" she said.

"No, of course not. I thought perhaps you didn't want to be
spoken to."

"Where are you going?"

"I wanted to have a look at the Manet, I've heard so much about
it."

"Would you like me to come with you? I know the Luxembourg
rather well. I could show you one or two good things."

He understood that, unable to bring herself to apologise
directly, she made this offer as amends.

"It's awfully kind of you. I should like it very much."

"You needn't say yes if you'd rather go alone," she said
suspiciously.

"I wouldn't."

They walked towards the gallery. Caillebotte's collection had
lately been placed on view, and the student for the first time
had the opportunity to examine at his ease the works of the
impressionists. Till then it had been possible to see them only
at Durand-Ruel's shop in the Rue Lafitte (and the dealer, unlike
his fellows in England, who adopt towards the painter an
attitude of superiority, was always pleased to show the
shabbiest student whatever he wanted to see), or at his private
house, to which it was not difficult to get a card of admission
on Tuesdays, and where you might see pictures of world-wide
reputation. Miss Price led Philip straight up to Manet's
_Olympia_. He looked at it in astonished silence.

"Do you like it?" asked Miss Price.

"I don't know," he answered helplessly.

"You can take it from me that it's the best thing in the gallery
except perhaps Whistler's portrait of his mother."

She gave him a certain time to contemplate the masterpiece and
then took him to a picture representing a railway-station.

"Look, here's a Monet," she said. "It's the Gare St. Lazare."

"But the railway lines aren't parallel," said Philip.

"What does that matter?" she asked, with a haughty air.

Philip felt ashamed of himself. Fanny Price had picked up the
glib chatter of the studios and had no difficulty in impressing
Philip with the extent of her knowledge. She proceeded to
explain the pictures to him, superciliously but not without
insight, and showed him what the painters had attempted and what
he must look for. She talked with much gesticulation of the
thumb, and Philip, to whom all she said was new, listened with
profound but bewildered interest. Till now he had worshipped
Watts and Burne-Jones. The pretty colour of the first, the
affected drawing of the second, had entirely satisfied his
aesthetic sensibilities. Their vague idealism, the suspicion of
a philosophical idea which underlay the titles they gave their
pictures, accorded very well with the functions of art as from
his diligent perusal of Ruskin he understood it; but here was
something quite different: here was no moral appeal; and the
contemplation of these works could help no one to lead a purer
and a higher life. He was puzzled.

At last he said: "You know, I'm simply dead. I don't think I can
absorb anything more profitably. Let's go and sit down on one of
the benches."

"It's better not to take too much art at a time," Miss Price
answered.

When they got outside he thanked her warmly for the trouble she
had taken.

"Oh, that's all right," she said, a little ungraciously. "I do
it because I enjoy it. We'll go to the Louvre tomorrow if you
like, and then I'll take you to Durand-Ruel's."

"You're really awfully good to me."

"You don't think me such a beast as the most of them do."

"I don't," he smiled.

"They think they'll drive me away from the studio; but they
won't; I shall stay there just exactly as long as it suits me.
All that this morning, it was Lucy Otter's doing, I know it was.
She always has hated me. She thought after that I'd take myself
off. I daresay she'd like me to go. She's afraid I know too much
about her."

Miss Price told him a long, involved story, which made out that
Mrs. Otter, a humdrum and respectable little person, had
scabrous intrigues. Then she talked of Ruth Chalice, the girl
whom Foinet had praised that morning.

"She's been with every one of the fellows at the studio. She's
nothing better than a street-walker. And she's dirty. She hasn't
had a bath for a month. I know it for a fact."

Philip listened uncomfortably. He had heard already that various
rumours were in circulation about Miss Chalice; but it was
ridiculous to suppose that Mrs. Otter, living with her mother,
was anything but rigidly virtuous. The woman walking by his side
with her malignant lying positively horrified him.

"I don't care what they say. I shall go on just the same. I know
I've got it in me. I feel I'm an artist. I'd sooner kill myself
than give it up. Oh, I shan't be the first they've all laughed
at in the schools and then he's turned out the only genius of
the lot. Art's the only thing I care for, I'm willing to give my
whole life to it. It's only a question of sticking to it and
pegging away"

She found discreditable motives for everyone who would not take
her at her own estimate of herself. She detested Clutton. She
told Philip that his friend had no talent really; it was just
flashy and superficial; he couldn't compose a figure to save his
life. And Lawson:

"Little beast, with his red hair and his freckles. He's so
afraid of Foinet that he won't let him see his work. After all,
I don't funk it, do I? I don't care what Foinet says to me, I
know I'm a real artist."

They reached the street in which she lived, and with a sigh of
relief Philip left her.


CHAPTER XLIV

BUT notwithstanding when Miss Price on the following Sunday
offered to take him to the Louvre Philip accepted. She showed
him Mona Lisa. He looked at it with a slight feeling of
disappointment, but he had read till he knew by heart the
jewelled words with which Walter Pater has added beauty to the
most famous picture in the world; and these now he repeated to
Miss Price.

"That's all literature," she said, a little contemptuously. "You
must get away from that."

She showed him the Rembrandts, and she said many appropriate
things about them. She stood in front of the _Disciples at
Emmaus_.

"When you feel the beauty of that," she said, "you'll know
something about painting."

She showed him the _Odalisque_ and _La Source_ of Ingres.
Fanny Price was a peremptory guide, she would not let him look
at the things he wished, and attempted to force his admiration
for all she admired. She was desperately in earnest with her
study of art, and when Philip, passing in the Long Gallery a
window that looked out on the Tuileries, gay, sunny, and urbane,
like a picture by Raffaelli, exclaimed:

"I say, how jolly! Do let's stop here a minute."

She said, indifferently: "Yes, it's all right. But we've come
here to look at pictures."

The autumn air, blithe and vivacious, elated Philip; and when
towards mid-day they stood in the great court-yard of the
Louvre, he felt inclined to cry like Flanagan: To hell with art.

"I say, do let's go to one of those restaurants in the Boul'
Mich' and have a snack together, shall we?" he suggested.

Miss Price gave him a suspicious look.

"I've got my lunch waiting for me at home," she answered.

"That doesn't matter. You can eat it tomorrow. Do let me stand
you a lunch."

"I don't know why you want to."

"It would give me pleasure," he replied, smiling.

They crossed the river, and at the corner of the Boulevard St.
Michel there was a restaurant.

"Let's go in there."

"No, I won't go there, it looks too expensive."

She walked on firmly, and Philip was obliged to follow. A few
steps brought them to a smaller restaurant, where a dozen people
were already lunching on the pavement under an awning; on the
window was announced in large white letters: _Dejeuner 1.25,
vin compris_.

"We couldn't have anything cheaper than this, and it looks quite
all right."

They sat down at a vacant table and waited for the omelette
which was the first article on the bill of fare. Philip gazed
with delight upon the passers-by. His heart went out to them. He
was tired but very happy.

"I say, look at that man in the blouse. Isn't he ripping!"

He glanced at Miss Price, and to his astonishment saw that she
was looking down at her plate, regardless of the passing
spectacle, and two heavy tears were rolling down her cheeks.

"What on earth's the matter?" he exclaimed.

"If you say anything to me I shall get up and go at once," she
answered.

He was entirely puzzled, but fortunately at that moment the
omelette came. He divided it in two and they began to eat.
Philip did his best to talk of indifferent things, and it seemed
as though Miss Price were making an effort on her side to be
agreeable; but the luncheon was not altogether a success. Philip
was squeamish, and the way in which Miss Price ate took his
appetite away. She ate noisily, greedily, a little like a wild
beast in a menagerie, and after she had finished each course
rubbed the plate with pieces of bread till it was white and
shining, as if she did not wish to lose a single drop of gravy.
They had Camembert cheese, and it disgusted Philip to see that
she ate rind and all of the portion that was given her. She
could not have eaten more ravenously if she were starving.

Miss Price was unaccountable, and having parted from her on one
day with friendliness he could never tell whether on the next
she would not be sulky and uncivil; but he learned a good deal
from her: though she could not draw well herself, she knew all
that could be taught, and her constant suggestions helped his
progress. Mrs. Otter was useful to him too, and sometimes Miss
Chalice criticised his work; he learned from the glib loquacity
of Lawson and from the example of Clutton. But Fanny Price hated
him to take suggestions from anyone but herself, and when he
asked her help after someone else had been talking to him she
would refuse with brutal rudeness. The other fellows, Lawson,
Clutton, Flanagan, chaffed him about her.

"You be careful, my lad," they said, "she's in love with you."

"Oh, what nonsense," he laughed.

The thought that Miss Price could be in love with anyone was
preposterous. It made him shudder when he thought of her
uncomeliness, the bedraggled hair and the dirty hands, the brown
dress she always wore, stained and ragged at the hem: he
supposed she was hard up, they were all hard up, but she might
at least be clean; and it was surely possible with a needle and
thread to make her skirt tidy.

Philip began to sort his impressions of the people he was thrown
in contact with. He was not so ingenuous as in those days which
now seemed so long ago at Heidelberg, and, beginning to take a
more deliberate interest in humanity, he was inclined to examine
and to criticise. He found it difficult to know Clutton any
better after seeing him every day for three months than on the
first day of their acquaintance. The general impression at the
studio was that he was able; it was supposed that he would do
great things, and he shared the general opinion; but what
exactly he was going to do neither he nor anybody else quite
knew. He had worked at several studios before Amitrano's, at
Julian's, the Beaux Arts, and MacPherson's, and was remaining
longer at Amitrano's than anywhere because he found himself more
left alone. He was not fond of showing his work, and unlike most
of the young men who were studying art neither sought nor gave
advice. It was said that in the little studio in the Rue
Campagne Premiere, which served him for work-room and bed-room,
he had wonderful pictures which would make his reputation if
only he could be induced to exhibit them. He could not afford a
model but painted still life, and Lawson constantly talked of a
plate of apples which he declared was a masterpiece. He was
fastidious, and, aiming at something he did not quite fully
grasp, was constantly dissatisfied with his work as a whole:
perhaps a part would please him, the forearm or the leg and foot
of a figure, a glass or a cup in a still-life; and he would cut
this out and keep it, destroying the rest of the canvas; so that
when people invited themselves to see his work he could
truthfully answer that he had not a single picture to show. In
Brittany he had come across a painter whom nobody else had heard
of, a queer fellow who had been a stockbroker and taken up
painting at middle-age, and he was greatly influenced by his
work. He was turning his back on the impressionists and working
out for himself painfully an individual way not only of painting
but of seeing. Philip felt in him something strangely original.

At Gravier's where they ate, and in the evening at the
Versailles or at the Closerie des Lilas Clutton was inclined to
taciturnity. He sat quietly, with a sardonic expression on his
gaunt face, and spoke only when the opportunity occurred to
throw in a witticism. He liked a butt and was most cheerful when
someone was there on whom he could exercise his sarcasm. He
seldom talked of anything but painting, and then only with the
one or two persons whom he thought worth while. Philip wondered
whether there was in him really anything: his reticence, the
haggard look of him, the pungent humour, seemed to suggest
personality, but might be no more than an effective mask which
covered nothing.

With Lawson on the other hand Philip Soon grew intimate. He had
a variety of interests which made him an agreeable companion. He
read more than most of the students and though his income was
small, loved to buy books. He lent them willingly; and Philip
became acquainted with Flaubert and Balzac, with Verlaine,
Heredia, and Villiers de l'Isle Adam. They went to plays
together and sometimes to the gallery of the Opera Comique.
There was the Odeon quite near them, and Philip Soon shared his
friend's passion for the tragedians of Louis XIV and the
sonorous Alexandrine. In the Rue Taitbout were the Concerts
Rouge, where for seventy-five centimes they could hear excellent
music and get into the bargain something which it was quite
possible to drink: the seats were uncomfortable, the place was
crowded, the air thick with caporal horrible to breathe, but in
their young enthusiasm they were indifferent. Sometimes they
went to the Bal Bullier. On these occasions Flanagan accompanied
them. His excitability and his roisterous enthusiasm made them
laugh. He was an excellent dancer, and before they had been ten
minutes in the room he was prancing round with some little
shop-girl whose acquaintance he had just made.

The desire of all of them was to have a mistress. It was part of
the paraphernalia of the art-student in Paris. It gave
consideration in the eyes of one's fellows. It was something to
boast about. But the difficulty was that they had scarcely
enough money to keep themselves, and though they argued that
French-women were so clever it cost no more to keep two then
one, they found it difficult to meet young women who were
willing to take that view of the circumstances. They had to
content themselves for the most part with envying and abusing
the ladies who received protection from painters of more settled
respectability than their own. It was extraordinary how
difficult these things were in Paris. Lawson would become
acquainted with some young thing and make an appointment; for
twenty-four hours he would be all in a flutter and describe the
charmer at length to everyone he met; but she never by any
chance turned up at the time fixed. He would come to Gravier's
very late, ill-tempered, and exclaim:

"Confound it, another rabbit! I don't know why it is they don't
like me. I suppose it's because I don't speak French well, or my
red hair. It's too sickening to have spent over a year in Paris
without getting hold of anyone."

"You don't go the right way to work," said Flanagan.

He had a long and enviable list of triumphs to narrate, and
though they took leave not to believe all he said, evidence
forced them to acknowledge that he did not altogether lie. But
he sought no permanent arrangement. He only had two years in
Paris: he had persuaded his people to let him come and study art
instead of going to college; but at the end of that period he
was to return to Seattle and go into his father's business. He
had made up his mind to get as much fun as possible into the
time, and demanded variety rather than duration in his love
affairs.

"I don't know how you get hold of them," said Lawson furiously.

"There's no difficulty about that, sonny," answered Flanagan.
"You just go right in. The difficulty is to get rid of them.
That's where you want tact."

Philip was too much occupied with his work, the books he was
reading, the plays he saw, the conversation he listened to, to
trouble himself with the desire for female society. He thought
there would be plenty of time for that when he could speak
French more glibly.

It was more than a year now since he had seen Miss Wilkinson,
and during his first weeks in Paris he had been too busy to
answer a letter she had written to him just before he left
Blackstable. When another came, knowing it would be full of
reproaches and not being just then in the mood for them, he put
it aside, intending to open it later; but he forgot and did not
run across it till a month afterwards, when he was turning out
a drawer to find some socks that had no holes in them. He looked
at the unopened letter with dismay. He was afraid that Miss
Wilkinson had suffered a good deal, and it made him feel a
brute; but she had probably got over the suffering by now, at
all events the worst of it. It suggested itself to him that
women were often very emphatic in their expressions. These did
not mean so much as when men used them. He had quite made up his
mind that nothing would induce him ever to see her again. He had
not written for so long that it seemed hardly worth while to
write now. He made up his mind not to read the letter.

"I daresay she won't write again," he said to himself. "She
can't help seeing the thing's over. After all, she was old
enough to be my mother; she ought to have known better."

For an hour or two he felt a little uncomfortable. His attitude
was obviously the right one, but he could not help a feeling of
dissatisfaction with the whole business. Miss Wilkinson,
however, did not write again; nor did she, as he absurdly
feared, suddenly appear in Paris to make him ridiculous before
his friends. In a little while he clean forgot her.

Meanwhile he definitely forsook his old gods. The amazement with
which at first he had looked upon the works of the
impressionists, changed to admiration; and presently he found
himself talking as emphatically as the rest on the merits of
Manet, Monet, and Degas. He bought a photograph of a drawing by
Ingres of the _Odalisque_ and a photograph of the _Olympia_.
They were pinned side by side over his washing-stand so that he
could contemplate their beauty while he shaved. He knew now
quite positively that there had been no painting of landscape
before Monet; and he felt a real thrill when he stood in front
of Rembrandt's _Disciples at Emmaus_ or Velasquez' _Lady
with the Flea-bitten Nose_. That was not her real name, but by
that she was distinguished at Gravier's to emphasise the
picture's beauty notwithstanding the somewhat revolting
peculiarity of the sitter's appearance. With Ruskin,
Burne-Jones, and Watts, he had put aside his bowler hat and the
neat blue tie with white spots which he had worn on coming to
Paris; and now disported himself in a soft, broad-brimmed hat,
a flowing black cravat, and a cape of romantic cut. He walked
along the Boulevard du Montparnasse as though he had known it
all his life, and by virtuous perseverance he had learnt to
drink absinthe without distaste. He was letting his hair grow,
and it was only because Nature is unkind and has no regard for
the immortal longings of youth that he did not attempt a beard.


CHAPTER XLV

PHILIP soon realised that the spirit which informed his friends
was Cronshaw's. It was from him that Lawson got his paradoxes;
and even Clutton, who strained after individuality, expressed
himself in the terms he had insensibly acquired from the older
man. It was his ideas that they bandied about at table, and on
his authority they formed their judgments. They made up for the
respect with which unconsciously they treated him by laughing at
his foibles and lamenting his vices.

"Of course, poor old Cronshaw will never do any good," they
said. "He's quite hopeless."

They prided themselves on being alone in appreciating his
genius; and though, with the contempt of youth for the follies
of middle-age, they patronised him among themselves, they did
not fail to look upon it as a feather in their caps if he had
chosen a time when only one was there to be particularly
wonderful. Cronshaw never came to Gravier's. For the last four
years he had lived in squalid conditions with a woman whom only
Lawson had once seen, in a tiny apartment on the sixth floor of
one of the most dilapidated houses on the Quai des Grands
Augustins: Lawson described with gusto the filth, the
untidiness, the litter.

"And the stink nearly blew your head off."

"Not at dinner, Lawson," expostulated one of the others.

But he would not deny himself the pleasure of giving picturesque
details of the odours which met his nostril. With a fierce
delight in his own realism he described the woman who had opened
the door for him. She was dark, small, and fat, quite young,
with black hair that seemed always on the point of coming down.
She wore a slatternly blouse and no corsets. With her red
cheeks, large sensual mouth, and shining, lewd eyes, she
reminded you of the _Bohemienne_ in the Louvre by Franz Hals.
She had a flaunting vulgarity which amused and yet horrified. A
scrubby, unwashed baby was playing on the floor. It was known
that the slut deceived Cronshaw with the most worthless
ragamuffins of the Quarter, and it was a mystery to the
ingenuous youths who absorbed his wisdom over a cafe table that
Cronshaw with his keen intellect and his passion for beauty
could ally himself to such a creature. But he seemed to revel in
the coarseness of her language and would often report some
phrase which reeked of the gutter. He referred to her ironically
as _la fille de mon concierge_. Cronshaw was very poor. He
earned a bare subsistence by writing on the exhibitions of
pictures for one or two English papers, and he did a certain
amount of translating. He had been on the staff of an English
paper in Paris, but had been dismissed for drunkenness; he still
however did odd jobs for it, describing sales at the Hotel
Drouot or the revues at music-halls. The life of Paris had got
into his bones, and he would not change it, notwithstanding its
squalor, drudgery, and hardship, for any other in the world. He
remained there all through the year, even in summer when
everyone he knew was away, and felt himself only at ease within
a mile of the Boulevard St. Michel. But the curious thing was
that he had never learnt to speak French passably, and he kept
in his shabby clothes bought at _La Belle Jardiniere_ an
ineradicably English appearance.

He was a man who would have made a success of life a century and
a half ago when conversation was a passport to good company and
inebriety no bar.

"I ought to have lived in the eighteen hundreds," he said
himself. "What I want is a patron. I should have published my
poems by subscription and dedicated them to a nobleman. I long
to compose rhymed couplets upon the poodle of a countess. My
soul yearns for the love of chamber-maids and the conversation
of bishops."

He quoted the romantic Rolla,

"_Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux_."

He liked new faces, and he took a fancy to Philip, who seemed to
achieve the difficult feat of talking just enough to suggest
conversation and not too much to prevent monologue. Philip was
captivated. He did not realise that little that Cronshaw said
was new. His personality in conversation had a curious power. He
had a beautiful and a sonorous voice, and a manner of putting
things which was irresistible to youth. All he said seemed to
excite thought, and often on the way home Lawson and Philip
would walk to and from one another's hotels, discussing some
point which a chance word of Cronshaw had suggested. It was
disconcerting to Philip, who had a youthful eagerness for
results, that Cronshaw's poetry hardly came up to expectation.
It had never been published in a volume, but most of it had
appeared in periodicals; and after a good deal of persuasion
Cronshaw brought down a bundle of pages torn out of _The
Yellow Book_, _The Saturday Review_, and other journals, on
each of which was a poem. Philip was taken aback to find that
most of them reminded him either of Henley or of Swinburne. It
needed the splendour of Cronshaw's delivery to make them
personal. He expressed his disappointment to Lawson, who
carelessly repeated his words; and next time Philip went to the
Closerie des Lilas the poet turned to him with his sleek smile:

"I hear you don't think much of my verses."

Philip was embarrassed.

"I don't know about that," he answered. "I enjoyed reading them
very much."

"Do not attempt to spare my feelings," returned Cronshaw, with
a wave of his fat hand. "I do not attach any exaggerated
importance to my poetical works. Life is there to be lived
rather than to be written about. My aim is to search out the
manifold experience that it offers, wringing from each moment
what of emotion it presents. I look upon my writing as a
graceful accomplishment which does not absorb but rather adds
pleasure to existence. And as for posterity--damn posterity."

Philip smiled, for it leaped to one's eyes that the artist in
life had produced no more than a wretched daub. Cronshaw looked
at him meditatively and filled his glass. He sent the waiter for
a packet of cigarettes.

"You are amused because I talk in this fashion and you know that
I am poor and live in an attic with a vulgar trollop who
deceives me with hair-dressers and _garcons de cafe_; I
translate wretched books for the British public, and write
articles upon contemptible pictures which deserve not even to be
abused. But pray tell me what is the meaning of life?"

"I say, that's rather a difficult question. Won't you give the
answer yourself?"

"No, because it's worthless unless you yourself discover it. But
what do you suppose you are in the world for?"

Philip had never asked himself, and he thought for a moment
before replying.

"Oh, I don't know: I suppose to do one's duty, and make the best
possible use of one's faculties, and avoid hurting other
people."

"In short, to do unto others as you would they should do unto
you?"

"I suppose so."

"Christianity."

"No, it isn't," said Philip indignantly. "It has nothing to do
with Christianity. It's just abstract morality."

"But there's no such thing as abstract morality."

"In that case, supposing under the influence of liquor you left
your purse behind when you leave here and I picked it up, why do
you imagine that I should return it to you? It's not the fear of
the police."

"It's the dread of hell if you sin and the hope of Heaven if you
are virtuous."

"But I believe in neither."

"That may be. Neither did Kant when he devised the Categorical
Imperative. You have thrown aside a creed, but you have
preserved the ethic which was based upon it. To all intents you
are a Christian still, and if there is a God in Heaven you will
undoubtedly receive your reward. The Almighty can hardly be such
a fool as the churches make out. If you keep His laws I don't
think He can care a packet of pins whether you believe in Him or
not."

"But if I left my purse behind you would certainly return it to
me," said Philip.

"Not from motives of abstract morality, but only from fear of
the police."

"It's a thousand to one that the police would never find out."

"My ancestors have lived in a civilised state so long that the
fear of the police has eaten into my bones. The daughter of my
_concierge_ would not hesitate for a moment. You answer that
she belongs to the criminal classes; not at all, she is merely
devoid of vulgar prejudice."

"But then that does away with honour and virtue and goodness and
decency and everything," said Philip.

"Have you ever committed a sin?"

"I don't know, I suppose so," answered Philip.

"You speak with the lips of a dissenting minister. I have never
committed a sin."

Cronshaw in his shabby great-coat, with the collar turned up,
and his hat well down on his head, with his red fat face and his
little gleaming eyes, looked extraordinarily comic; but Philip
was too much in earnest to laugh.

"Have you never done anything you regret?"

"How can I regret when what I did was inevitable?" asked
Cronshaw in return.

"But that's fatalism."

"The illusion which man has that his will is free is so deeply
rooted that I am ready to accept it. I act as though I were a
free agent. But when an action is performed it is clear that all
the forces of the universe from all eternity conspired to cause
it, and nothing I could do could have prevented it. It was
inevitable. If it was good I can claim no merit; if it was bad
I can accept no censure."

"My brain reels," said Philip.

"Have some whiskey," returned Cronshaw, passing over the bottle.
"There's nothing like it for clearing the head. You must expect
to be thick-witted if you insist upon drinking beer."

Philip shook his head, and Cronshaw proceeded:

"You're not a bad fellow, but you won't drink. Sobriety disturbs
conversation. But when I speak of good and bad..." Philip saw he
was taking up the thread of his discourse, "I speak
conventionally. I attach no meaning to those words. I refuse to
make a hierarchy of human actions and ascribe worthiness to some
and ill-repute to others. The terms vice and virtue have no
signification for me. I do not confer praise or blame: I accept.
I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world."

"But there are one or two other people in the world," objected
Philip.

"I speak only for myself. I know them only as they limit my
activities. Round each of them too the world turns, and each one
for himself is the centre of the universe. My right over them
extends only as far as my power. What I can do is the only limit
of what I may do. Because we are gregarious we live in society,
and society holds together by means of force, force of arms
(that is the policeman) and force of public opinion (that is
Mrs. Grundy). You have society on one hand and the individual on
the other: each is an organism striving for self-preservation.
It is might against might. I stand alone, bound to accept
society and not unwilling, since in return for the taxes I pay
it protects me, a weakling, against the tyranny of another
stronger than I am; but I submit to its laws because I must; I
do not acknowledge their justice: I do not know justice, I only
know power. And when I have paid for the policeman who protects
me and, if I live in a country where conscription is in force,
served in the army which guards my house and land from the
invader, I am quits with society: for the rest I counter its
might with my wiliness. It makes laws for its self-preservation,
and if I break them it imprisons or kills me: it has the might
to do so and therefore the right. If I break the laws I will
accept the vengeance of the state, but I will not regard it as
punishment nor shall I feel myself convicted of wrong-doing.
Society tempts me to its service by honours and riches and the
good opinion of my fellows; but I am indifferent to their good
opinion, I despise honours and I can do very well without
riches."

"But if everyone thought like you things would go to pieces at
once."

"I have nothing to do with others, I am only concerned with
myself. I take advantage of the fact that the majority of
mankind are led by certain rewards to do things which directly
or indirectly tend to my convenience."

"It seems to me an awfully selfish way of looking at things,"
said Philip.

"But are you under the impression that men ever do anything
except for selfish reasons?"

"Yes."

"It is impossible that they should. You will find as you grow
older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable
place to live in is to recognise the inevitable selfishness of
humanity. You demand unselfishness from others, which is a
preposterous claim that they should sacrifice their desires to
yours. Why should they? When you are reconciled to the fact that
each is for himself in the world you will ask less from your
fellows. They will not disappoint you, and you will look upon
them more charitably. Men seek but one thing in life--their
pleasure."

"No, no, no!" cried Philip.

Cronshaw chuckled.

"You rear like a frightened colt, because I use a word to which
your Christianity ascribes a deprecatory meaning. You have a
hierarchy of values; pleasure is at the bottom of the ladder,
and you speak with a little thrill of self-satisfaction, of
duty, charity, and truthfulness. You think pleasure is only of
the senses; the wretched slaves who manufactured your morality
despised a satisfaction which they had small means of enjoying.
You would not be so frightened if I had spoken of happiness
instead of pleasure: it sounds less shocking, and your mind
wanders from the sty of Epicurus to his garden. But I will speak
of pleasure, for I see that men aim at that, and I do not know
that they aim at happiness. It is pleasure that lurks in the
practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions
because they are good for him, and when they are good for other
people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure
in giving alms he is charitable; if he finds pleasure in helping
others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for
society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private
pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for
my private pleasure that I drink another whiskey and soda. I,
less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my
pleasure nor demand your admiration."

"But have you never known people do things they didn't want to
instead of things they did?"

"No. You put your question foolishly. What you mean is that
people accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate
pleasure. The objection is as foolish as your manner of putting
it. It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an
immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater
pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but
their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule. You are
puzzled because you cannot get over the idea that pleasures are
only of the senses; but, child, a man who dies for his country
dies because he likes it as surely as a man eats pickled cabbage
because he likes it. It is a law of creation. If it were
possible for men to prefer pain to pleasure the human race would
have long since become extinct."

"But if all that is true," cried Philip, "what is the use of
anything? If you take away duty and goodness and beauty why are
we brought into the world?"

"Here comes the gorgeous East to suggest an answer," smiled
Cronshaw.

He pointed to two persons who at that moment opened the door of
the cafe, and, with a blast of cold air, entered. They were
Levantines, itinerant vendors of cheap rugs, and each bore on
his arm a bundle. It was Sunday evening, and the cafe was very
full. They passed among the tables, and in that atmosphere heavy
and discoloured with tobacco smoke, rank with humanity, they
seemed to bring an air of mystery. They were clad in European,
shabby clothes, their thin great-coats were threadbare, but each
wore a tarbouch. Their faces were gray with cold. One was of
middle age, with a black beard, but the other was a youth of
eighteen, with a face deeply scarred by smallpox and with one
eye only. They passed by Cronshaw and Philip.

"Allah is great, and Mahomet is his prophet," said Cronshaw
impressively.

The elder advanced with a cringing smile, like a mongrel used to
blows. With a sidelong glance at the door and a quick
surreptitious movement he showed a pornographic picture.

"Are you Masr-ed-Deen, the merchant of Alexandria, or is it from
far Bagdad that you bring your goods, O, my uncle; and yonder
one-eyed youth, do I see in him one of the three kings of whom
Scheherazade told stories to her lord?"

The pedlar's smile grew more ingratiating, though he understood
no word of what Cronshaw said, and like a conjurer he produced
a sandalwood box.

"Nay, show us the priceless web of Eastern looms," quoth
Cronshaw. "For I would point a moral and adorn a tale."

The Levantine unfolded a table-cloth, red and yellow, vulgar,
hideous, and grotesque.

"Thirty-five francs," he said.

"O, my uncle, this cloth knew not the weavers of Samarkand, and
those colours were never made in the vats of Bokhara."

"Twenty-five francs," smiled the pedlar obsequiously.

"Ultima Thule was the place of its manufacture, even Birmingham
the place of my birth."

"Fifteen francs," cringed the bearded man.

"Get thee gone, fellow," said Cronshaw. "May wild asses defile
the grave of thy maternal grandmother."

Imperturbably, but smiling no more, the Levantine passed with
his wares to another table. Cronshaw turned to Philip.

"Have you ever been to the Cluny, the museum? There you will see
Persian carpets of the most exquisite hue and of a pattern the
beautiful intricacy of which delights and amazes the eye. In
them you will see the mystery and the sensual beauty of the
East, the roses of Hafiz and the wine-cup of Omar; but presently
you will see more. You were asking just now what was the meaning
of life. Go and look at those Persian carpets, and one of these
days the answer will come to you."

"You are cryptic," said Philip.

"I am drunk," answered Cronshaw.


CHAPTER XLVI

PHILIP did not find living in Paris as cheap as he had been led
to believe and by February had spent most of the money with
which he started. He was too proud to appeal to his guardian,
nor did he wish Aunt Louisa to know that his circumstances were
straitened, since he was certain she would make an effort to
send him something from her own pocket, and he knew how little
she could afford to. In three months he would attain his
majority and come into possession of his small fortune. He tided
over the interval by selling the few trinkets which he had
inherited from his father.

At about this time Lawson suggested that they should take a
small studio which was vacant in one of the streets that led out
of the Boulevard Raspail. It was very cheap. It had a room
attached, which they could use as a bed-room; and since Philip
was at the school every morning Lawson could have the
undisturbed use of the studio then; Lawson, after wandering from
school to school, had come to the conclusion that he could work
best alone, and proposed to get a model in three or four days a
week. At first Philip hesitated on account of the expense, but
they reckoned it out; and it seemed (they were so anxious to
have a studio of their own that they calculated pragmatically)
that the cost would not be much greater than that of living in
a hotel. Though the rent and the cleaning by the _concierge_
would come to a little more, they would save on the _petit
dejeuner_, which they could make themselves. A year or two
earlier Philip would have refused to share a room with anyone,
since he was so sensitive about his deformed foot, but his
morbid way of looking at it was growing less marked: in Paris it
did not seem to matter so much, and, though he never by any
chance forgot it himself, he ceased to feel that other people
were constantly noticing it.

They moved in, bought a couple of beds, a washing-stand, a few
chairs, and felt for the first time the thrill of possession.
They were so excited that the first night they went to bed in
what they could call a home they lay awake talking till three in
the morning; and next day found lighting the fire and making
their own coffee, which they had in pyjamas, such a jolly
business that Philip did not get to Amitrano's till nearly
eleven. He was in excellent spirits. He nodded to Fanny Price.

"How are you getting on?" he asked cheerily.

"What does that matter to you?" she asked in reply.

Philip could not help laughing.

"Don't jump down my throat. I was only trying to make myself
polite."

"I don't want your politeness."

"D'you think it's worth while quarrelling with me too?" asked
Philip mildly. "There are so few people you're on speaking terms
with, as it is."

"That's my business, isn't it?"

"Quite."

He began to work, vaguely wondering why Fanny Price made herself
so disagreeable. He had come to the conclusion that he
thoroughly disliked her. Everyone did. People were only civil to
her at all from fear of the malice of her tongue; for to their
faces and behind their backs she said abominable things. But
Philip was feeling so happy that he did not want even Miss Price
to bear ill-feeling towards him. He used the artifice which had
often before succeeded in banishing her ill-humour.

"I say, I wish you'd come and look at my drawing. I've got in an
awful mess."

"Thank you very much, but I've got something better to do with
my time."

Philip stared at her in surprise, for the one thing she could be
counted upon to do with alacrity was to give advice. She went on
quickly in a low voice, savage with fury.

"Now that Lawson's gone you think you'll put up with me. Thank
you very much. Go and find somebody else to help you. I don't
want anybody else's leavings."

Lawson had the pedagogic instinct; whenever he found anything
out he was eager to impart it; and because he taught with
delight he talked with profit. Philip, without thinking anything
about it, had got into the habit of sitting by his side; it
never occurred to him that Fanny Price was consumed with
jealousy, and watched his acceptance of someone else's tuition
with ever-increasing anger.

"You were very glad to put up with me when you knew nobody
here," she said bitterly, "and as soon as you made friends with
other people you threw me aside, like an old glove"--she
repeated the stale metaphor with satisfaction--"like an old
glove. All right, I don't care, but I'm not going to be made a
fool of another time."

There was a suspicion of truth in what she said, and it made
Philip angry enough to answer what first came into his head.

"Hang it all, I only asked your advice because I saw it pleased
you."

She gave a gasp and threw him a sudden look of anguish. Then two
tears rolled down her cheeks. She looked frowsy and grotesque.
Philip, not knowing what on earth this new attitude implied,
went back to his work. He was uneasy and conscience-stricken;
but he would not go to her and say he was sorry if he had caused
her pain, because he was afraid she would take the opportunity
to snub him. For two or three weeks she did not speak to him,
and, after Philip had got over the discomfort of being cut by
her, he was somewhat relieved to be free from so difficult a
friendship. He had been a little disconcerted by the air of
proprietorship she assumed over him. She was an extraordinary
woman. She came every day to the studio at eight o'clock, and
was ready to start working when the model was in position; she
worked steadily, talking to no one, struggling hour after hour
with difficulties she could not overcome, and remained till the
clock struck twelve. Her work was hopeless. There was not in it
the smallest approach even to the mediocre achievement at which
most of the young persons were able after some months to arrive.
She wore every day the same ugly brown dress, with the mud of
the last wet day still caked on the hem and with the raggedness,
which Philip had noticed the first time he saw her, still
unmended.

But one day she came up to him, and with a scarlet face asked
whether she might speak to him afterwards.

"Of course, as much as you like," smiled Philip. "I'll wait
behind at twelve."

He went to her when the day's work was over.

"Will you walk a little bit with me?" she said, looking away
from him with embarrassment.

"Certainly."

They walked for two or three minutes in silence.

"D'you remember what you said to me the other day?" she asked
then on a sudden.

"Oh, I say, don't let's quarrel," said Philip. "It really isn't
worth while."

She gave a quick, painful inspiration.

"I don't want to quarrel with you. You're the only friend I had
in Paris. I thought you rather liked me. I felt there was
something between us. I was drawn towards you--you know what I
mean, your club-foot."

Philip reddened and instinctively tried to walk without a limp.
He did not like anyone to mention the deformity. He knew what
Fanny Price meant. She was ugly and uncouth, and because he was
deformed there was between them a certain sympathy. He was very
angry with her, but he forced himself not to speak.

"You said you only asked my advice to please me. Don't you think
my work's any good?"

"I've only seen your drawing at Amitrano's. It's awfully hard to
judge from that."

"I was wondering if you'd come and look at my other work. I've
never asked anyone else to look at it. I should like to show it
to you."

"It's awfully kind of you. I'd like to see it very much."

"I live quite near here," she said apologetically. "It'll only
take you ten minutes."

"Oh, that's all right," he said.

They were walking along the boulevard, and she turned down a
side street, then led him into another, poorer still, with cheap
shops on the ground floor, and at last stopped. They climbed
flight after flight of stairs. She unlocked a door, and they
went into a tiny attic with a sloping roof and a small window.
This was closed and the room had a musty smell. Though it was
very cold there was no fire and no sign that there had been one.
The bed was unmade. A chair, a chest of drawers which served
also as a wash-stand, and a cheap easel, were all the furniture.
The place would have been squalid enough in any case, but the
litter, the untidiness, made the impression revolting. On the
chimney-piece, scattered over with paints and brushes, were a
cup, a dirty plate, and a tea-pot.

"If you'll stand over there I'll put them on the chair so that
you can see them better."

She showed him twenty small canvases, about eighteen by twelve.
She placed them on the chair, one after the other, watching his
face; he nodded as he looked at each one.

"You do like them, don't you?" she said anxiously, after a bit.

"I just want to look at them all first," he answered. "I'll talk
afterwards."

He was collecting himself. He was panic-stricken. He did not
know what to say. It was not only that they were ill-drawn, or
that the colour was put on amateurishly by someone who had no
eye for it; but there was no attempt at getting the values, and
the perspective was grotesque. It looked like the work of a
child of five, but a child would have had some naivete and might
at least have made an attempt to put down what he saw; but here
was the work of a vulgar mind chock full of recollections of
vulgar pictures. Philip remembered that she had talked
enthusiastically about Monet and the Impressionists, but here
were only the worst traditions of the Royal Academy.

"There," she said at last, "that's the lot."

Philip was no more truthful than anybody else, but he had a
great difficulty in telling a thundering, deliberate lie, and he
blushed furiously when he answered:

"I think they're most awfully good."

A faint colour came into her unhealthy cheeks, and she smiled a
little.

"You needn't say so if you don't think so, you know. I want the
truth."

"But I do think so."

"Haven't you got any criticism to offer? There must be some you
don't like as well as others."

Philip looked round helplessly. He saw a landscape, the typical
picturesque `bit' of the amateur, an old bridge, a creeper-clad
cottage, and a leafy bank.

"Of course I don't pretend to know anything about it," he said.
"But I wasn't quite sure about the values of that."

She flushed darkly and taking up the picture quickly turned its
back to him.

"I don't know why you should have chosen that one to sneer at.
It's the best thing I've ever done. I'm sure my values are all
right. That's a thing you can't teach anyone, you either
understand values or you don't."

"I think they're all most awfully good," repeated Philip.

She looked at them with an air of self-satisfaction.

"I don't think they're anything to be ashamed of."

Philip looked at his watch.

"I say, it's getting late. Won't you let me give you a little
lunch?"

"I've got my lunch waiting for me here."

Philip saw no sign of it, but supposed perhaps the _concierge_
would bring it up when he was gone. He was in a hurry to get
away. The mustiness of the room made his head ache.


CHAPTER XLVII

IN MARCH there was all the excitement of sending in to the
Salon. Clutton, characteristically, had nothing ready, and he
was very scornful of the two heads that Lawson sent; they were
obviously the work of a student, straight-forward portraits of
models, but they had a certain force; Clutton, aiming at
perfection, had no patience with efforts which betrayed
hesitancy, and with a shrug of the shoulders told Lawson it was
an impertinence to exhibit stuff which should never have been
allowed out of his studio; he was not less contemptuous when the
two heads were accepted. Flanagan tried his luck too, but his
picture was refused. Mrs. Otter sent a blameless _Portrait de
ma Mere_, accomplished and second-rate; and was hung in a very
good place.

Hayward, whom Philip had not seen since he left Heidelberg,
arrived in Paris to spend a few days in time to come to the
party which Lawson and Philip were giving in their studio to
celebrate the hanging of Lawson's pictures. Philip had been
eager to see Hayward again, but when at last they met, he
experienced some disappointment. Hayward had altered a little in
appearance: his fine hair was thinner, and with the rapid
wilting of the very fair, he was becoming wizened and
colourless; his blue eyes were paler than they had been, and
there was a muzziness about his features. On the other hand, in
mind he did not seem to have changed at all, and the culture
which had impressed Philip at eighteen aroused somewhat the
contempt of Philip at twenty-one. He had altered a good deal
himself, and regarding with scorn all his old opinions of art,
life, and letters, had no patience with anyone who still held
them. He was scarcely conscious of the fact that he wanted to
show off before Hayward, but when he took him round the
galleries he poured out to him all the revolutionary opinions
which himself had so recently adopted. He took him to Manet's
_Olympia_ and said dramatically:

"I would give all the old masters except Velasqued, Rembrandt,
and Vermeer for that one picture."

"Who was Vermeer?" asked Hayward.

"Oh, my dear fellow, don't you know Vermeer? You're not
civilised. You mustn't live a moment longer without making his
acquaintance. He's the one old master who painted like a
modern."

He dragged Hayward out of the Luxembourg and hurried him off to
the Louvre.

"But aren't there any more pictures here?" asked Hayward, with
the tourist's passion for thoroughness.

"Nothing of the least consequence. You can come and look at them
by yourself with your Baedeker."

When they arrived at the Louvre Philip led his friend down the
Long Gallery.

"I should like to see _The Gioconda_," said Hayward.

"Oh, my dear fellow, it's only literature," answered Philip.

At last, in a small room, Philip stopped before _The
Lacemaker_ of Vermeer van Delft.

"There, that's the best picture in the Louvre. It's exactly like
a Manet."

With an expressive, eloquent thumb Philip expatiated on the
charming work. He used the jargon of the studios with
overpowering effect.

"I don't know that I see anything so wonderful as all that in
it," said Hayward.

"Of course it's a painter's picture," said Philip. "I can quite
believe the layman would see nothing much in it."

"The what?" said Hayward.

"The layman."

Like most people who cultivate an interest in the arts, Hayward
was extremely anxious to be right. He was dogmatic with those
who did not venture to assert themselves, but with the
self-assertive he was very modest. He was impressed by Philip's
assurance, and accepted meekly Philip's implied suggestion that
the painter's arrogant claim to be the sole possible judge of
painting has anything but its impertinence to recommend it.

A day or two later Philip and Lawson gave their party. Cronshaw,
making an exception in their favour, agreed to eat their food;
and Miss Chalice offered to come and cook for them. She took no
interest in her own sex and declined the suggestion that other
girls should be asked for her sake. Clutton, Flanagan, Potter,
and two others made up the party. Furniture was scarce, so the
model stand was used as a table, and the guests were to sit on
portmanteaux if they liked, and if they didn't on the floor. The
feast consisted of a _pot-au-feu_, which Miss Chalice had
made, of a leg of mutton roasted round the corner and brought
round hot and savoury (Miss Chalice had cooked the potatoes, and
the studio was redolent of the carrots she had fried; fried
carrots were her specialty); and this was to be followed by
_poires flambees_, pears with burning brandy, which Cronshaw had
volunteered to make. The meal was to finish with an enormous
_fromage de Brie_, which stood near the window and added fragrant
odours to all the others which filled the studio. Cronshaw sat
in the place of honour on a Gladstone bag, with his legs curled
under him like a Turkish bashaw, beaming good-naturedly on the
young people who surrounded him. From force of habit, though the
small studio with the stove lit was very hot, he kept on his
great-coat, with the collar turned up, and his bowler hat: he
looked with satisfaction on the four large _fiaschi_ of
Chianti which stood in front of him in a row, two on each side
of a bottle of whiskey; he said it reminded him of a slim fair
Circassian guarded by four corpulent eunuchs. Hayward in order
to put the rest of them at their ease had clothed himself in a
tweed suit and a Trinity Hall tie. He looked grotesquely
British. The others were elaborately polite to him, and during
the soup they talked of the weather and the political situation.
There was a pause while they waited for the leg of mutton, and
Miss Chalice lit a cigarette.

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair," she said suddenly.

With an elegant gesture she untied a ribbon so that her tresses
fell over her shoulders. She shook her head.

"I always feel more comfortable with my hair down."

With her large brown eyes, thin, ascetic face, her pale skin,
and broad forehead, she might have stepped out of a picture by
Burne-Jones. She had long, beautiful hands, with fingers deeply
stained by nicotine. She wore sweeping draperies, mauve and
green. There was about her the romantic air of High Street,
Kensington. She was wantonly aesthetic; but she was an excellent
creature, kind and good natured; and her affectations were but
skin-deep. There was a knock at the door, and they all gave a
shout of exultation. Miss Chalice rose and opened. She took the
leg of mutton and held it high above her, as though it were the
head of John the Baptist on a platter; and, the cigarette still
in her mouth, advanced with solemn, hieratic steps.

"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.


CHAPTER XLVIII

WHEN PHILIP returned to Amitrano's he found that Fanny Price was
no longer working there. She had given up the key of her locker.
He asked Mrs. Otter whether she knew what had become of her; and
Mrs. Otter, with a shrug of the shoulders, answered that she had
probably gone back to England. Philip was relieved. He was
profoundly bored by her ill-temper. Moreover she insisted on
advising him about his work, looked upon it as a slight when he
did not follow her precepts, and would not understand that he
felt himself no longer the duffer he had been at first. Soon he
forgot all about her. He was working in oils now and he was full
of enthusiasm. He hoped to have something done of sufficient
importance to send to the following year's Salon. Lawson was
painting a portrait of Miss Chalice. She was very paintable, and
all the young men who had fallen victims to her charm had made
portraits of her. A natural indolence, joined with a passion for
picturesque attitude, made her an excellent sitter; and she had
enough technical knowledge to offer useful criticisms. Since her
passion for art was chiefly a passion to live the life of
artists, she was quite content to neglect her own work. She
liked the warmth of the studio, and the opportunity to smoke
innumerable cigarettes; and she spoke in a low, pleasant voice
of the love of art and the art of love. She made no clear
distinction between the two.

Lawson was painting with infinite labour, working till he could
hardly stand for days and then scraping out all he had done. He
would have exhausted the patience of anyone but Ruth Chalice. At
last he got into a hopeless muddle.

"The only thing is to take a new canvas and start fresh," he
said. "I know exactly what I want now, and it won't take me
long."

Philip was present at the time, and Miss Chalice said to him:

"Why don't you paint me too? You'll be able to learn a lot by
watching Mr. Lawson."

It was one of Miss Chalice's delicacies that she always
addressed her lovers by their surnames.

"I should like it awfully if Lawson wouldn't mind."

"I don't care a damn," said Lawson.

It was the first time that Philip set about a portrait, and he
began with trepidation but also with pride. He sat by Lawson and
painted as he saw him paint. He profited by the example and by
the advice which both Lawson and Miss Chalice freely gave him.
At last Lawson finished and invited Clutton in to criticise.
Clutton had only just come back to Paris. From Provence he had
drifted down to Spain, eager to see Velasquez at Madrid, and
thence he had gone to Toledo. He stayed there three months, and
he was returned with a name new to the young men: he had
wonderful things to say of a painter called El Greco, who it
appeared could only be studied in Toledo.

"Oh yes, I know about him," said Lawson, "he's the old master
whose distinction it is that he painted as badly as the
moderns."

Clutton, more taciturn than ever, did not answer, but he looked
at Lawson with a sardonic air.

"Are you going to show us the stuff you've brought back from
Spain?" asked Philip.

"I didn't paint in Spain, I was too busy."

"What did you do then?"

"I thought things out. I believe I'm through with the
Impressionists; I've got an idea they'll seem very thin and
superficial in a few years. I want to make a clean sweep of
everything I've learnt and start fresh. When I came back I
destroyed everything I'd painted. I've got nothing in my studio
now but an easel, my paints, and some clean canvases."

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know yet. I've only got an inkling of what I want."

He spoke slowly, in a curious manner, as though he were
straining to hear something which was only just audible. There
seemed to be a mysterious force in him which he himself did not
understand, but which was struggling obscurely to find an
outlet. His strength impressed you. Lawson dreaded the criticism
he asked for and had discounted the blame he thought he might
get by affecting a contempt for any opinion of Clutton's; but
Philip knew there was nothing which would give him more pleasure
than Clutton's praise. Clutton looked at the portrait for some
time in silence, then glanced at Philip's picture, which was
standing on an easel.

"What's that?" he asked. "Oh, I had a shot at a portrait too."

"The sedulous ape," he murmured.

He turned away again to Lawson's canvas. Philip reddened but did
not speak.

"Well, what d'you think of it?" asked Lawson at length.

"The modelling's jolly good," said Clutton. "And I think it's
very well drawn."

"D'you think the values are all right?"

"Quite."

Lawson smiled with delight. He shook himself in his clothes like
a wet dog.

"I say, I'm jolly glad you like it."

"I don't. I don't think it's of the smallest importance."

Lawson's face fell, and he stared at Clutton with astonishment:
he had no notion what he meant, Clutton had no gift of
expression in words, and he spoke as though it were an effort.
What he had to say was confused, halting, and verbose; but
Philip knew the words which served as the text of his rambling
discourse. Clutton, who never read, had heard them first from
Cronshaw; and though they had made small impression, they had
remained in his memory; and lately, emerging on a sudden, had
acquired the character of a revelation: a good painter had two
chief objects to paint, namely, man and the intention of his
soul. The Impressionists had been occupied with other problems,
they had painted man admirably, but they had troubled themselves
as little as the English portrait painters of the eighteenth
century with the intention of his soul.

"But when you try to get that you become literary," said Lawson,
interrupting. "Let me paint the man like Manet, and the
intention of his soul can go to the devil."

"That would be all very well if you could beat Manet at his own
game, but you can't get anywhere near him. You can't feed
yourself on the day before yesterday, it's ground which has been
swept dry. You must go back. It's when I saw the Grecos that I
felt one could get something more out of portraits than we knew
before."

"It's just going back to Ruskin," cried Lawson.

"No--you see, he went for morality: I don't care a damn for
morality: teaching doesn't coOme in, ethics and all that, but
passion and emotion. The greatest portrait painters have painted
both, man and the intention of his soul; Rembrandt and El Greco;
it's only the second-raters who've only painted man. A lily of
the valley would be lovely even if it didn't smell, but it's
more lovely because it has perfume. That picture"--he pointed to
Lawson's portrait--"well, the drawing's all right and so's the
modelling all right, but just conventional; it ought to be drawn
and modelled so that you know the girl's a lousy slut.
Correctness is all very well: El Greco made his people eight
feet high because he wanted to express something he couldn't get
any other way."

"Damn El Greco," said Lawson, "what's the good of jawing about
a man when we haven't a chance of seeing any of his work?"

Clutton shrugged his shoulders, smoked a cigarette in silence,
and went away. Philip and Lawson looked at one another.

"There's something in what he says," said Philip.

Lawson stared ill-temperedly at his picture.

"How the devil is one to get the intention of the soul except by
painting exactly what one sees?"


About this time Philip made a new friend. On Monday morning
models assembled at the school in order that one might be chosen
for the week, and one day a young man was taken who was plainly
not a model by profession. Philip's attention was attracted by
the manner in which he held himself: when he got on to the stand
he stood firmly on both feet, square, with clenched hands, and
with his head defiantly thrown forward; the attitude emphasised
his fine figure; there was no fat on him, and his muscles stood
out as though they were of iron. His head, close-cropped, was
well-shaped, and he wore a short beard; he had large, dark eyes
and heavy eyebrows. He held the pose hour after hour without
appearance of fatigue. There was in his mien a mixture of shame
and of determination. His air of passionate energy excited
Philip's romantic imagination, and when, the sitting ended, he
saw him in his clothes, it seemed to him that he wore them as
though he were a king in rags. He was uncommunicative, but in a
day or two Mrs. Otter told Philip that the model was a Spaniard
and that he had never sat before.

"I suppose he was starving," said Philip.

"Have you noticed his clothes? They're quite neat and decent,
aren't they?"

It chanced that Potter, one of the Americans who worked at
Amitrano's, was going to Italy for a couple of months, and
offered his studio to Philip. Philip was pleased. He was growing
a little impatient of Lawson's peremptory advice and wanted to
be by himself. At the end of the week he went up to the model
and on the pretence that his drawing was not finished asked
whether he would come and sit to him one day.

"I'm not a model," the Spaniard answered. "I have other things
to do next week."

"Come and have luncheon with me now, and we'll talk about it,"
said Philip, and as the other hesitated, he added with a smile:
"It won't hurt you to lunch with me."

With a shrug of the shoulders the model consented, and they went
off to a _cremerie_. The Spaniard spoke broken French, fluent
but difficult to follow, and Philip managed to get on well
enough with him. He found out that he was a writer. He had come
to Paris to write novels and kept himself meanwhile by all the
expedients possible to a penniless man; he gave lessons, he did
any translations he could get hold of, chiefly business
documents, and at last had been driven to make money by his fine
figure. Sitting was well paid, and what he had earned during the
last week was enough to keep him for two more; he told Philip,
amazed, that he could live easily on two francs a day; but it
filled him with shame that he was obliged to show his body for
money, and he looked upon sitting as a degradation which only
hunger could excuse. Philip explained that he did not want him
to sit for the figure, but only for the head; he wished to do a
portrait of him which he might send to the next Salon.

"But why should you want to paint me?" asked the Spaniard.

Philip answered that the head interested him, he thought he
could do a good portrait.

"I can't afford the time. I grudge every minute that I have to
rob from my writing."

"But it would only be in the afternoon. I work at the school in
the morning. After all, it's better to sit to me than to do
translations of legal documents."

There were legends in the Latin quarter of a time when students
of different countries lived together intimately, but this was
long since passed, and now the various nations were almost as
much separated as in an Oriental city. At Julian's and at the
Beaux Arts a French student was looked upon with disfavour by
his fellow-countrymen when he consorted with foreigners, and it
was difficult for an Englishman to know more than quite
superficially any native inhabitants of the city in which he
dwelt. Indeed, many of the students after living in Paris for
five years knew no more French than served them in shops and
lived as English a life as though they were working in South
Kensington.

Philip, with his passion for the romantic, welcomed the
opportunity to get in touch with a Spaniard; he used all his
persuasiveness to overcome the man's reluctance.

"I'll tell you what I'll do," said the Spaniard at last. "I'll
sit to you, but not for money, for my own pleasure."

Philip expostulated, but the other was firm, and at length they
arranged that he should come on the following Monday at one
o'clock. He gave Philip a card on which was printed his name:
Miguel Ajuria.

Miguel sat regularly, and though he refused to accept payment he
borrowed fifty francs from Philip every now and then: it was a
little more expensive than if Philip had paid for the sittings
in the usual way; but gave the Spaniard a satisfactory feeling
that he was not earning his living in a degrading manner. His
nationality made Philip regard him as a representative of
romance, and he asked him about Seville and Granada, Velasquez
and Calderon. But Miguel bad no patience with the grandeur of
his country. For him, as for so many of his compatriots, France
was the only country for a man of intelligence and Paris the
centre of the world.

"Spain is dead," he cried. "It has no writers, it has no art, it
has nothing."

Little by little, with the exuberant rhetoric of his race, he
revealed his ambitions. He was writing a novel which he hoped
would make his name. He was under the influence of Zola, and he
had set his scene in Paris. He told Philip the story at length.
To Philip it seemed crude and stupid; the naive obscenity--
_c'est la vie, mon cher, c'est la vie_, he cried--the naive
obscenity served only to emphasise the conventionality of the
anecdote. He had written for two years, amid incredible
hardships, denying himself all the pleasures of life which had
attracted him to Paris, fighting with starvation for art's sake,
determined that nothing should hinder his great achievement. The
effort was heroic.

"But why don't you write about Spain?" cried Philip. "It would
be so much more interesting. You know the life."

"But Paris is the only place worth writing about. Paris is
life."

One day he brought part of the manuscript, and in his bad
French, translating excitedly as he went along so that Philip
could scarcely understand, he read passages. It was lamentable.
Philip, puzzled, looked at the picture he was painting: the mind
behind that broad brow was trivial; and the flashing, passionate
eyes saw nothing in life but the obvious. Philip was not
satisfied with his portrait, and at the end of a sitting he
nearly always scraped out what he had done. It was all very well
to aim at the intention of the soul: who could tell what that
was when people seemed a mass of contradictions? He liked
Miguel, and it distressed him to realise that his magnificent
struggle was futile: he had everything to make a good writer but
talent. Philip looked at his own work. How could you tell
whether there was anything in it or whether you were wasting
your time? It was clear that the will to achieve could not help
you and confidence in yourself meant nothing. Philip thought of
Fanny Price; she had a vehement belief in her talent; her
strength of will was extraordinary.

"If I thought I wasn't going to be really good, I'd rather give
up painting," said Philip. "I don't see any use in being a
second-rate painter."

Then one morning when he was going out, the _concierge_ called
out to him that there was a letter. Nobody wrote to him but his
Aunt Louisa and sometimes Hayward, and this was a handwriting he
did not know. The letter was as follows:


Please come at once when you get this. I couldn't put up with it
any more. Please come yourself. I can't bear the thought that
anyone else should touch me. I want you to have everything.
                                                   F. Price

I have not had anything to eat for three days.


Philip felt on a sudden sick with fear. He hurried to the house
in which she lived. He was astonished that she was in Paris at
all. He had not seen her for months and imagined she had long
since returned to England. When he arrived he asked the
_concierge_ whether she was in.

"Yes, I've not seen her go out for two days."

Philip ran upstairs and knocked at the door. There was no reply.
He called her name. The door was locked, and on bending down he
found the key was in the lock.

"Oh, my God, I hope she hasn't done something awful," he cried
aloud.

He ran down and told the porter that she was certainly in the
room. He had had a letter from her and feared a terrible
accident. He suggested breaking open the door. The porter, who
had been sullen and disinclined to listen, became alarmed; he
could not take the responsibility of breaking into the room;
they must go for the _commissaire de police_. They walked
together to the _bureau_, and then they fetched a locksmith.
Philip found that Miss Price had not paid the last quarter's
rent: on New Year's Day she had not given the _concierge_ the
present which old-established custom led him to regard as a
right. The four of them went upstairs, and they knocked again at
the door. There was no reply. The locksmith set to work, and at
last they entered the room. Philip gave a cry and instinctively
covered his eyes with his hands. The wretched woman was hanging
with a rope round her neck, which she had tied to a hook in the
ceiling fixed by some previous tenant to hold up the curtains of
the bed. She had moved her own little bed out of the way and had
stood on a chair, which had been kicked away. it was lying on
its side on the floor. They cut her down. The body was quite
cold.


CHAPTER XLIX

THE story which Philip made out in one way and another was
terrible. One of the grievances of the women-students was that
Fanny Price would never share their gay meals in restaurants,
and the reason was obvious: she had been oppressed by dire
poverty. He remembered the luncheon they had eaten together when
first he came to Paris and the ghoulish appetite which had
disgusted him: he realised now that she ate in that manner
because she was ravenous. The _concierge_ told him what her
food had consisted of. A bottle of milk was left for her every
day and she brought in her own loaf of bread; she ate half the
loaf and drank half the milk at mid-day when she came back from
the school, and consumed the rest in the evening. It was the
same day after day. Philip thought with anguish of what she must
have endured. She had never given anyone to understand that she
was poorer than the rest, but it was clear that her money had
been coming to an end, and at last she could not afford to come
any more to the studio. The little room was almost bare of
furniture, and there were no other clothes than the shabby brown
dress she had always worn. Philip searched among her things for
the address of some friend with whom he could communicate. He
found a piece of paper on which his own name was written a score
of times. It gave him a peculiar shock. He supposed it was true
that she had loved him; he thought of the emaciated body, in the
brown dress, hanging from the nail in the ceiling; and he
shuddered. But if she had cared for him why did she not let him
help her? He would so gladly have done all he could. He felt
remorseful because he had refused to see that she looked upon
him with any particular feeling, and now these words in her
letter were infinitely pathetic: I can't bear the thought that
anyone else should touch me. She had died of starvation.

Philip found at length a letter signed: your loving brother,
Albert. it was two or three weeks old, dated from some road in
Surbiton, and refused a loan of five pounds. The writer had his
wife and family to think of, he didn't feel justified in lending
money, and his advice was that Fanny should come back to London
and try to get a situation. Philip telegraphed to Albert Price,
and in a little while an answer came:

"Deeply distressed. Very awkward to leave my business. Is
presence essential. Price."

Philip wired a succinct affirmative, and next morning a stranger
presented himself at the studio.

"My name's Price," he said, when Philip opened the door.

He was a commonish man in black with a band round his bowler
hat; he had something of Fanny's clumsy look; he wore a stubbly
moustache, and had a cockney accent. Philip asked him to come
in. He cast sidelong glances round the studio while Philip gave
him details of the accident and told him what he had done.

"I needn't see her, need I?" asked Albert Price. "My nerves
aren't very strong, and it takes very little to upset me."

He began to talk freely. He was a rubber-merchant, and he had a
wife and three children. Fanny was a governess, and he couldn't
make out why she hadn't stuck to that instead of coming to
Paris.

"Me and Mrs. Price told her Paris was no place for a girl. And
there's no money in art--never 'as been."

It was plain enough that he had not been on friendly terms with
his sister, and he resented her suicide as a last injury that
she had done him. He did not like the idea that she had been
forced to it by poverty; that seemed to reflect on the family.
The idea struck him that possibly there was a more respectable
reason for her act.

"I suppose she 'adn't any trouble with a man, 'ad she? You know
what I mean, Paris and all that. She might 'ave done it so as
not to disgrace herself."

Philip felt himself reddening and cursed his weakness. Price's
keen little eyes seemed to suspect him of an intrigue.

"I believe your sister to have been perfectly virtuous," he
answered acidly. "She killed herself because she was starving."

"Well, it's very 'ard on her family, Mr. Carey. She only 'ad to
write to me. I wouldn't have let my sister want."

Philip had found the brother's address only by reading the
letter in which he refused a loan; but he shrugged his
shoulders: there was no use in recrimination. He hated the
little man and wanted to have done with him as soon as possible.
Albert Price also wished to get through the necessary business
quickly so that he could get back to London. They went to the
tiny room in which poor Fanny had lived. Albert Price looked at
the pictures and the furniture.

"I don't pretend to know much about art," he said. "I suppose
these pictures would fetch something, would they?"

"Nothing," said Philip.

"The furniture's not worth ten shillings."

Albert Price knew no French and Philip had to do everything. It
seemed that it was an interminable process to get the poor body
safely hidden away under ground: papers had to be obtained in
one place and signed in another; officials had to be seen. For
three days Philip was occupied from morning till night. At last
he and Albert Price followed the hearse to the cemetery at
Montparnasse.

"I want to do the thing decent," said Albert Price, "but there's
no use wasting money."

The short ceremony was infinitely dreadful in the cold gray
morning. Half a dozen people who had worked with Fanny Price at
the studio came to the funeral, Mrs. Otter because she was
_massiere_ and thought it her duty, Ruth Chalice because she had
a kind heart, Lawson, Clutton, and Flanagan. They had all
disliked her during her life. Philip, looking across the
cemetery crowded on all sides with monuments, some poor and
simple, others vulgar, pretentious, and ugly, shuddered. It was
horribly sordid. When they came out Albert Price asked Philip to
lunch with him. Philip loathed him now and he was tired; he had
not been sleeping well, for he dreamed constantly of Fanny Price
in the torn brown dress, hanging from the nail in the ceiling;
but he could not think of an excuse.

"You take me somewhere where we can get a regular slap-up lunch.
All this is the very worst thing for my nerves."

"Lavenue's is about the best place round here," answered Philip.

Albert Price settled himself on a velvet seat with a sigh of
relief. He ordered a substantial luncheon and a bottle of wine.

"Well, I'm glad that's over," he said.

He threw out a few artful questions, and Philip discovered that
he was eager to hear about the painter's life in Paris. He
represented it to himself as deplorable, but he was anxious for
details of the orgies which his fancy suggested to him. With sly
winks and discrect sniggering he conveyed that he knew very well
that there was a great deal more than Philip confessed. He was
a man of the world, and he knew a thing or two. He asked Philip
whether he had ever been to any of those places in Montmartre
which are celebrated from Temple Bar to the Royal Exchange. He
would like to say he had been to the Moulin Rouge. The luncheon
was very good and the wine excellent. Albert Price expanded as
the processes of digestion went satisfactorily forwards.

"Let's 'ave a little brandy," he said when the coffee was
brought, "and blow the expense."

He rubbed his hands.

"You know, I've got 'alf a mind to stay over tonight and go back
tomorrow. What d'you say to spending the evening together?"

"If you mean you want me to take you round Montmartre tonight,
I'll see you damned," said Philip.

"I suppose it wouldn't be quite the thing."

The answer was made so seriously that Philip was tickled.

"Besides it would be rotten for your nerves," he said gravely.

Albert Price concluded that he had better go back to London by
the four o'clock train, and presently he took leave of Philip.

"Well, good-bye, old man," he said. "I tell you what, I'll try
and come over to Paris again one of these days and I'll look you
up. And then we won't 'alf go on the razzle."

Philip was too restless to work that afternoon, so he jumped on
a bus and crossed the river to see whether there were any
pictures on view at Durand-Ruel's. After that he strolled along
the boulevard. It was cold and wind-swept. People hurried by
wrapped up in their coats, shrunk together in an effort to keep
out of the cold, and their faces were pinched and careworn. It
was icy underground in the cemetery at Montparnasse among all
those white tombstones. Philip felt lonely in the world and
strangely homesick. He wanted company. At that hour Cronshaw
would be working, and Clutton never welcomed visitors; Lawson
was painting another portrait of Ruth Chalice and would not care
to be disturbed. He made up his mind to go and see Flanagan. He
found him painting, but delighted to throw up his work and talk.
The studio was comfortable, for the American had more money than
most of them, and warm; Flanagan set about making tea. Philip
looked at the two heads that he was sending to the Salon.

"It's awful cheek my sending anything," said Flanagan, "but I
don't care, I'm going to send. D'you think they're rotten?"

"Not so rotten as I should have expected," said Philip.

They showed in fact an astounding cleverness. The difficulties
had been avoided with skill, and there was a dash about the way
in which the paint was put on which was surprising and even
attractive. Flanagan, without knowledge or technique, painted
with the loose brush of a man who has spent a lifetime in the
practice of the art.

"If one were forbidden to look at any picture for more than
thirty seconds you'd be a great master, Flanagan," smiled
Philip.

These young people were not in the habit of spoiling one another
with excessive flattery.

"We haven't got time in America to spend more than thirty
seconds in looking at any picture," laughed the other.

Flanagan, though he was the most scatter-brained person in the
world, had a tenderness of heart which was unexpected and
charming. Whenever anyone was ill he installed himself as
sick-nurse. His gaiety was better than any medicine. Like many
of his countrymen he had not the English dread of sentimentality
which keeps so tight a hold on emotion; and, finding nothing
absurd in the show of feeling, could offer an exuberant sympathy
which was often grateful to his friends in distress. He saw that
Philip was depressed by what he had gone through and with
unaffected kindliness set himself boisterously to cheer him up.
He exaggerated the Americanisms which he knew always made the
Englishmen laugh and poured out a breathless stream of
conversation, whimsical, high-spirited, and jolly. In due course
they went out to dinner and afterwards to the Gaite
Montparnasse, which was Flanagan's favourite place of amusement.
By the end of the evening he was in his most extravagant humour.
He had drunk a good deal, but any inebriety from which he
suffered was due much more to his own vivacity than to alcohol.
He proposed that they should go to the Bal Bullier, and Philip,
feeling too tired to go to bed, willingly enough consented. They
sat down at a table on the platform at the side, raised a little
from the level of the floor so that they could watch the
dancing, and drank a bock. Presently Flanagan saw a friend and
with a wild shout leaped over the barrier on to the space where
they were dancing. Philip watched the people. Bullier was not
the resort of fashion. It was Thursday night and the place was
crowded. There were a number of students of the various
faculties, but most of the men were clerks or assistants in
shops; they wore their everyday clothes, ready-made tweeds or
queer tail-coats, and their hats, for they had brought them in
with them, and when they danced there was no place to put them
but their heads. Some of the women looked like servant-girls,
and some were painted hussies, but for the most part they were
shop-girls. They were poorly-dressed in cheap imitation of the
fashions on the other side of the river. The hussies were got up
to resemble the music-hall artiste or the dancer who enjoyed
notoriety at the moment; their eyes were heavy with black and
their cheeks impudently scarlet. The hall was lit by great white
lights, low down, which emphasised the shadows on the faces; all
the lines seemed to harden under it, and the colours were most
crude. It was a sordid scene. Philip leaned over the rail,
staring down, and he ceased to hear the music. They danced
furiously. They danced round the room, slowly, talking very
little, with all their attention given to the dance. The room
was hot, and their faces shone with sweat. it seemed to Philip
that they had thrown off the guard which people wear on their
expression, the homage to convention, and he saw them now as
they really were. In that moment of abandon they were strangely
animal: some were foxy and some were wolf-like; and others had
the long, foolish face of sheep. Their skins were sallow from
the unhealthy life they led and the poor food they ate. Their
features were blunted by mean interests, and their little eyes
were shifty and cunning. There was nothing of nobility in their
bearing, and you felt that for all of them life was a long
succession of petty concerns and sordid thoughts. The air was
heavy with the musty smell of humanity. But they danced
furiously as though impelled by some strange power within them,
and it seemed to Philip that they were driven forward by a rage
for enjoyment. They were seeking desperately to escape from a
world of horror. The desire for pleasure which Cronshaw said was
the only motive of human action urged them blindly on, and the
very vehemence of the desire seemed to rob it of all pleasure.
They were hurried on by a great wind, helplessly, they knew not
why and they knew not whither. Fate seemed to tower above them,
and they danced as though everlasting darkness were beneath
their feet. Their silence was vaguely alarming. It was as if
life terrified them and robbed them of power of speech so that
the shriek which was in their hearts died at their throats.
Their eyes were haggard and grim; and notwithstanding the
beastly lust that disfigured them, and the meanness of their
faces, and the cruelty, notwithstanding the stupidness which was
worst of all, the anguish of those fixed eyes made all that
crowd terrible and pathetic. Philip loathed them, and yet his
heart ached with the infinite pity which filled him.

He took his coat from the cloak-room and went out into the
bitter coldness of the night.


CHAPTER L

PHILIP could not get the unhappy event out of his head. What
troubled him most was the uselessness of Fanny's effort. No one
could have worked harder than she, nor with more sincerity; she
believed in herself with all her heart; but it was plain that
self-confidence meant very little, all his friends had it,
Miguel Ajuria among the rest; and Philip was shocked by the
contrast between the Spaniard's heroic endeavour and the
triviality of the thing he attempted. The unhappiness of
Philip's life at school had called up in him the power of
self-analysis; and this vice, as subtle as drug-taking, had
taken possession of him so that he had now a peculiar keenness
in the dissection of his feelings. He could not help seeing that
art affected him differently from others. A fine picture gave
Lawson an immediate thrill. His appreciation was instinctive.
Even Flanagan felt certain things which Philip was obliged to
think out. His own appreciation was intellectual. He could not
help thinking that if he had in him the artistic temperament (he
hated the phrase, but could discover no other) he would feel
beauty in the emotional, unreasoning way in which they did. He
began to wonder whether he had anything more than a superficial
cleverness of the hand which enabled him to copy objects with
accuracy. That was nothing. He had learned to despise technical
dexterity. The important thing was to feel in terms of paint.
Lawson painted in a certain way because it was his nature to,
and through the imitativeness of a student sensitive to every
influence, there pierced individuality. Philip looked at his own
portrait of Ruth Chalice, and now that three months had passed
he realised that it was no more than a servile copy of Lawson.
He felt himself barren. He painted with the brain, and he could
not help knowing that the only painting worth anything was done
with the heart.

He had very little money, barely sixteen hundred pounds, and it
would be necessary for him to practise the severest economy. He
could not count on earning anything for ten years. The history
of painting was full of artists who had earned nothing at all.
He must resign himself to penury; and it was worth while if he
produced work which was immortal; but he had a terrible fear
that he would never be more than second-rate. Was it worth while
for that to give up one's youth, and the gaiety of life, and the
manifold chances of being? He knew the existence of foreign
painters in Paris enough to see that the lives they led were
narrowly provincial. He knew some who had dragged along for
twenty years in the pursuit of a fame which always escaped them
till they sunk into sordidness and alcoholism. Fanny's suicide
had aroused memories, and Philip heard ghastly stories of the
way in which one person or another had escaped from despair. He
remembered the scornful advice which the master had given poor
Fanny: it would have been well for her if she had taken it and
given up an attempt which was hopeless.

Philip finished his portrait of Miguel Ajuria and made up his
mind to send it to the Salon. Flanagan was sending two pictures,
and he thought he could paint as well as Flanagan. He had worked
so hard on the portrait that he could not help feeling it must
have merit. It was true that when he looked at it he felt that
there was something wrong, though he could not tell what; but
when he was away from it his spirits went up and he was not
dissatisfied. He sent it to the Salon and it was refused. He did
not mind much, since he had done all he could to persuade
himself that there was little chance that it would be taken,
till Flanagan a few days later rushed in to tell Lawson and
Philip that one of his pictures was accepted. With a blank face
Philip offered his congratulations, and Flanagan was so busy
congratulating himself that he did not catch the note of irony
which Philip could not prevent from coming into his voice.
Lawson, quicker-witted, observed it and looked at Philip
curiously. His own picture was all right, he knew that a day or
two before, and he was vaguely resentful of Philip's attitude.
But he was surprised at the sudden question which Philip put him
as soon as the American was gone.

"If you were in my place would you chuck the whole thing?"

"What do you mean?"

"I wonder if it's worth while being a second-rate painter. You
see, in other things, if you're a doctor or if you're in
business, it doesn't matter so much if you're mediocre. You make
a living and you get along. But what is the good of turning out
second-rate pictures?"

Lawson was fond of Philip and, as soon as he thought he was
seriously distressed by the refusal of his picture, he set
himself to console him. It was notorious that the Salon had
refused pictures which were afterwards famous; it was the first
time Philip had sent, and he must expect a rebuff; Flanagan's
success was explicable, his picture was showy and superficial:
it was just the sort of thing a languid jury would see merit in.
Philip grew impatient; it was humiliating that Lawson should
think him capable of being seriously disturbed by so trivial a
calamity and would not realise that his dejection was due to a
deep-seated distrust of his powers.

Of late Clutton had withdrawn himself somewhat from the group
who took their meals at Gravier's, and lived very much by
himself. Flanagan said he was in love with a girl, but Clutton's
austere countenance did not suggest passion; and Philip thought
it more probable that he separated himself from his friends so
that he might grow clear with the new ideas which were in him.
But that evening, when the others had left the restaurant to go
to a play and Philip was sitting alone, Clutton came in and
ordered dinner. They began to talk, and finding Clutton more
loquacious and less sardonic than usual, Philip determined to
take advantage of his good humour.

"I say I wish you'd come and look at my picture," he said. "I'd
like to know what you think of it."

"No, I won't do that."

"Why not?" asked Philip, reddening.

The request was one which they all made of one another, and no
one ever thought of refusing. Clutton shrugged his shoulders.

"People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.
Besides, what's the good of criticism? What does it matter if
your picture is good or bad?"

"It matters to me."

"No. The only reason that one paints is that one can't help it.
it's a function like any of the other functions of the body,
only comparatively few people have got it. One paints for
oneself: otherwise one would commit suicide. Just think of it,
you spend God knows how long trying to get something on to
canvas, putting the sweat of your soul into it, and what is the
result? Ten to one it will be refused at the Salon; if it's
accepted, people glance at it for ten seconds as they pass; if
you're lucky some ignorant fool will buy it and put it on his
walls and look at it as little as he looks at his dining-room
table. Criticism has nothing to do with the artist. it judges
objectively, but the objective doesn't concern the artist."

Clutton put his hands over his eyes so that he might concentrate
his mind on what he wanted to say.

"The artist gets a peculiar sensation from something he sees,
and is impelled to express it and, he doesn't know why, he can
only express his feeling by lines and colours. It's like a
musician; he'll read a line or two, and a certain combination of
notes presents itself to him: he doesn't know why such and such
words call forth in him such and such notes; they just do. And
I'll tell you another reason why criticism is meaningless: a
great painter forces the world to see nature as he sees it; but
in the next generation another painter sees the world in another
way, and then the public judges him not by himself but by his
predecessor. So the Barbizon people taught our fathers to look
at trees in a certain manner, and when Monet came along and
painted differently, people said: But trees aren't like that. It
never struck them that trees are exactly how a painter chooses
to see them. We paint from within outwards--if we force our
vision on the world it calls us great painters; if we don't it
ignores us; but we are the same. We don't attach any meaning to
greatness or to smallness. What happens to our work afterwards
is unimportant; we have got all we could out of it while we were
doing it."

There was a pause while Clutton with voracious appetite devoured
the food that was set before him. Philip, smoking a cheap cigar,
observed him closely. The ruggedness of the head, which looked
as though it were carved from a stone refractory to the
sculptor's chisel, the rough mane of dark hair, the great nose,
and the massive bones of the jaw, suggested a man of strength;
and yet Philip wondered whether perhaps the mask conculed a
strange weakness. Clutton's refusal to show his work might be
sheer vanity: he could not bear the thought of anyone's
criticism, and he would not expose himself to the chance of a
refusal from the Salon; he wanted to be received as a master and
would not risk comparisons with other work which might force him
to diminish his own opinion of himself. During the eighteen
months Philip had known him Clutton had grown more harsh and
bitter; though he would not come out into the open and compete
with his fellows, he was indignant with the facile success of
those who did. He had no patience with Lawson, and the pair were
no longer on the intimate terms upon which they had been when
Philip first knew them.

"Lawson's all right," he said contemptuously, "he'll go back to
England, become a fashionable portrait painter, urn ten thousand
a year and be an A. R. A. before he's forty. Portraits done by
hand for the nobility and gentry!"

Philip, too, looked into the future, and he saw Clutton in
twenty years, bitter, lonely, savage, and unknown; still in
Paris, for the life there had got into his bones, ruling a small
_cenacle_ with a savage tongue, at war with himself and the
world, producing little in his increasing passion for a
perfection he could not reach; and perhaps sinking at last into
drunkenness. Of late Philip had been captivated by an idea that
since one had only one life it was important to make a success
of it, but he did not count success by the acquiring of money or
the achieving of fame; he did not quite know yet what he meant
by it, perhaps variety of experience and the making the most of
his abilities. It was plain anyway that the life which Clutton
seemed destined to was failure. Its only justification would be
the painting of imperishable masterpieces. He recollected
Cronshaw's whimsical metaphor of the Persian carpet; he had
thought of it often; but Cronshaw with his faun-like humour had
refused to make his meaning clear: he repeated that it had none
unless one discovered it for oneself. It was this desire to make
a success of life which was at the bottom of Philip's
uncertainty about continuing his artistic career. But Clutton
began to talk again.

"D'you remember my telling you about that chap I met in
Brittany? I saw him the other day here. He's just off to Tahiti.
He was broke to the world. He was a _brasseur d'affaires_, a
stockbroker I suppose you call it in English; and he had a wife
and family, and he was earning a large income. He chucked it all
to become a painter. He just went off and settled down in
Brittany and began to paint. He hadn't got any money and did the
next best thing to starving."

"And what about his wife and family?" asked Philip.

"Oh, he dropped them. He left them to starve on their own
account."

"It sounds a pretty low-down thing to do."

"Oh, my dear fellow, if you want to be a gentleman you must give
up being an artist. They've got nothing to do with one another.
You hear of men painting pot-boilers to keep an aged
mother--well, it shows they're excellent sons, but it's no
excuse for bad work. They're only tradesmen. An artist would let
his mother go to the workhouse. There's a writer I know over
here who told me that his wife died in childbirth. He was in
love with her and he was mad with grief, but as he sat at the
bedside watching her die he found himself making mental notes of
how she looked and what she said and the things he was feeling.
Gentlemanly, wasn't it?"

"But is your friend a good painter?" asked Philip.

"No, not yet, he paints just like Pissarro. He hasn't found
himself, but he's got a sense of colour and a sense of
decoration. But that isn't the question. it's the feeling, and
that he's got. He's behaved like a perfect cad to his wife and
children, he's always behaving like a perfect cad; the way he
treats the people who've helped him--and sometimes he's been
saved from starvation merely by the kindness of his friends--is
simply beastly. He just happens to be a great artist."

Philip pondered over the man who was willing to sacrifice
everything, comfort, home, money, love, honour, duty, for the
sake of getting on to canvas with paint the emotion which the
world gave him. it was magnificent, and yet his courage failed
him.

Thinking of Cronshaw recalled to him the fact that he had not
seen him for a week, and so, when Clutton left him, he wandered
along to the cafe in which he was certain to find the writer.
During the first few months of his stay in Paris Philip had
accepted as gospel all that Cronshaw said, but Philip had a
practical outlook and he grew impatient with the theories which
resulted in no action. Cronshaw's slim bundle of poetry did not
seem a substantial result for a life which was sordid. Philip
could not wrench out of his nature the instincts of the
middle-class from which he came; and the penury, the hack work
which Cronshaw did to keep body and soul together, the monotony
of existence between the slovenly attic and the cafe table,
jarred with his respectability. Cronshaw was astute enough to
know that the young man disapproved of him, and he attacked his
philistinism with an irony which was sometimes playful but often
very keen.

"You're a tradesman," he told Philip, "you want to invest life
in consols so that it shall bring you in a safe three per cent.
I'm a spendthrift, I run through my capital. I shall spend my
last penny with my last heartbeat."

The metaphor irritated Philip, because it assumed for the
speaker a romantic attitude and cast a slur upon the position
which Philip instinctively felt had more to say for it than he
could think of at the moment.

But this evening Philip, undecided, wanted to talk about
himself. Fortunately it was late already and Cronshaw's pile of
saucers on the table, each indicating a drink, suggested that he
was prepared to take an independent view of things in general.

"I wonder if you'd give me some advice," said Philip suddenly.
"You won't take it, will you?" Philip shrugged his shoulders
impatiently.

"I don't believe I shall ever do much good as a painter. I don't
see any use in being second-rate. I'm thinking of chucking it."

"Why shouldn't you?"

Philip hesitated for an instant.

"I suppose I like the life."

A change Came over Cronshaw's placid, round face. The corners of
the mouth were suddenly depressed, the eyes sunk dully in their
orbits; he seemed to become strangely bowed and old.

"This?" he cried, looking round the cafe in which they sat. His
voice really trembled a little.

"If you can get out of it, do while there's time."

Philip stared at him with astonishment, but the sight of emotion
always made him feel shy, and he dropped his eyes. He knew that
he was looking upon the tragedy of failure. There was silence.
Philip thought that Cronshaw was looking upon his own life; and
perhaps he considered his youth with its bright hopes and the
disappointments which wore out the radiancy; the wretched
monotony of pleasure, and the black future. Philip's eyes rested
on the little pile of saucers, and he knew that Cronshaw's were
on them too.