Chapter XXIX

by William Somerset Maugham

　　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 itsdoors. Philip and Hayward went to it two or three times a week with thepraiseworthy intention of improving their German, and Philip found it amore diverting manner of perfecting himself in the language than listeningto 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'sDie Ehre was then a new play, and on its production in the quietuniversity town caused the greatest excitement; it was extravagantlypraised and bitterly attacked; other dramatists followed with playswritten under the modern influence, and Philip witnessed a series of worksin which the vileness of mankind was displayed before him. He had neverbeen to a play in his life till then (poor touring companies sometimescame to the Assembly Rooms at Blackstable, but the Vicar, partly onaccount 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 felta thrill the moment he got into the little, shabby, ill-lit theatre. Soonhe came to know the peculiarities of the small company, and by the castingcould tell at once what were the characteristics of the persons in thedrama; but this made no difference to him. To him it was real life. It wasa strange life, dark and tortured, in which men and women showed toremorseless eyes the evil that was in their hearts: a fair face concealeda depraved mind; the virtuous used virtue as a mask to hide their secretvice, the seeming-strong fainted within with their weakness; the honestwere corrupt, the chaste were lewd. You seemed to dwell in a room wherethe night before an orgy had taken place: the windows had not been openedin 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 thehypocrite or the fool: the characters expressed themselves in cruel wordsthat seemed wrung out of their hearts by shame and anguish.Philip was carried away by the sordid intensity of it. He seemed to seethe world again in another fashion, and this world too he was anxious toknow. After the play was over he went to a tavern and sat in the brightwarmth with Hayward to eat a sandwich and drink a glass of beer. All roundwere little groups of students, talking and laughing; and here and therewas a family, father and mother, a couple of sons and a girl; andsometimes the girl said a sharp thing, and the father leaned back in hischair and laughed, laughed heartily. It was very friendly and innocent.There was a pleasant homeliness in the scene, but for this Philip had noeyes. 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'tthink I can stay here much longer. I want to get to London so that I canreally begin. I want to have experiences. I'm so tired of preparing forlife: I want to live it now."Sometimes Hayward left Philip to go home by himself. He would neverexactly reply to Philip's eager questioning, but with a merry, ratherstupid laugh, hinted at a romantic amour; he quoted a few lines ofRossetti, and once showed Philip a sonnet in which passion and purple,pessimism and pathos, were packed together on the subject of a young ladycalled Trude. Hayward surrounded his sordid and vulgar little adventureswith a glow of poetry, and thought he touched hands with Pericles andPheidias because to describe the object of his attentions he used the wordhetaira instead of one of those, more blunt and apt, provided by theEnglish language. Philip in the daytime had been led by curiosity to passthrough the little street near the old bridge, with its neat white housesand green shutters, in which according to Hayward the Fraulein Trudelived; but the women, with brutal faces and painted cheeks, who came outof their doors and cried out to him, filled him with fear; and he fled inhorror from the rough hands that sought to detain him. He yearned aboveall things for experience and felt himself ridiculous because at his agehe had not enjoyed that which all fiction taught him was the mostimportant thing in life; but he had the unfortunate gift of seeing thingsas they were, and the reality which was offered him differed too terriblyfrom the ideal of his dreams.He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossedbefore the traveller through life comes to an acceptance of reality. It isan 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 truthlessideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come incontact with the real they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if theywere victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by thenecessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who lookback upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them foran unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have readand all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery isanother nail driven into the body on the cross of life. The strange thingis that each one who has gone through that bitter disillusionment adds toit in his turn, unconsciously, by the power within him which is strongerthan himself. The companionship of Hayward was the worst possible thingfor Philip. He was a man who saw nothing for himself, but only through aliterary atmosphere, and he was dangerous because he had deceived himselfinto sincerity. He honestly mistook his sensuality for romantic emotion,his vacillation for the artistic temperament, and his idleness forphilosophic calm. His mind, vulgar in its effort at refinement, saweverything a little larger than life size, with the outlines blurred, ina golden mist of sentimentality. He lied and never knew that he lied, andwhen it was pointed out to him said that lies were beautiful. He was anidealist.