Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham [178]
“Aren’t you going to take a practice then?”
“Not for a good long time at any rate,” Philip answered. “As soon as I’ve got through my hospital appointments I shall get a ship; I want to go to the East—the Malay Archipelago, Siam, China, and all that sort of thing—and then I shall take odd jobs. Something always comes along—cholera duty in India and things like that. I want to go from place to place. I want to see the world. The only way a poor man can do that is by going in for the medical.”
They came to Greenwich then. The noble building of Inigo Jones faced the river grandly.
“I say, look, that must be the place where Poor Jack dived into the mud for pennies,” said Philip.
They wandered in the Park. Ragged children were playing in it, and it was noisy with their cries: here and there old seamen were basking in the sun. There was an air of a hundred years ago.
“It seems a pity you wasted two years in Paris,” said Hayward.
“Waste? Look at the movement of that child, look at the pattern which the sun makes on the ground, shining through the trees, look at that sky—why, I should never have seen that sky if I hadn’t been to Paris.”
Hayward thought that Philip choked a sob, and he looked at him with astonishment.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing. I’m sorry to be so damned emotional, but for six months I’ve been starved for beauty.”
“You used to be so matter-of-fact. It’s very interesting to hear you say that.”
“Damn it all, I don’t want to be interesting,” laughed Philip. “Let’s go and have a stodgy tea.”
LXV
Hayward’s visit did Philip a great deal of good. Each day his thoughts dwelt less on Mildred. He looked back upon the past with disgust. He could not understand how he had submitted to the dishonor of such a love; and when he thought of Mildred it was with angry hatred, because she had submitted to him to so much humiliation. His imagination presented her to him now with her defects of person and manner exaggerated, so that he shuddered at the thought of having been connected with her.
“It just shows how damned weak I am,” he said to himself. The adventure was like a blunder that one had committed at a party so horrible that one felt nothing could be done to excuse it: the only remedy was to forget. His horror at the degradation he had suffered helped him. He was like a snake casting its skin and he looked upon the old covering with nausea. He exulted in the possession of himself once more; he realized how much of the delight of the world he had lost when he was absorbed in that madness which they called love; he had had enough of it; he did not want to be in love anymore if love was that. Philip told Hayward something of what he had gone through.
“Wasn’t it Sophocles,” he asked, “who prayed for the time when he would be delivered from the wild beast of passion that devoured his heart-strings?”
Philip seemed really to be born again. He breathed the circumambient air as though he had never breathed it before, and he took a child’s pleasure in all the facts of the world. He called his period of insanity six months’ hard labor.
Hayward had only been settled in London a few days when Philip received from Blackstable, where it had been sent, a card for a private view at some picture gallery. He took Hayward, and, on looking at the catalog, saw that Lawson had a picture in it.
“I suppose he sent the card,” said Philip. “Let’s go and find him, he’s sure to be in front of his picture.”
This, a profile of Ruth Chalice, was tucked away in a comer, and Lawson was not far from it. He looked a little lost, in his large soft hat and loose, pale clothes, amongst the fashionable throng that had gathered for the private view. He greeted Philip with enthusiasm, and with his usual volubility told him that he had come to live in London, Ruth Chalice was a hussy, he had taken a studio,