Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham.mobi [174]
Lawson had been spending the summer at Poole, and had a number of sketches to show of the harbor and of the beach. He had a couple of commissions for portraits and proposed to stay in London till the bad light drove him away. Hayward, in London too, intended to spend the winter abroad, but remained week after week from sheer inability to make up his mind to go. Hayward had run to fat during the last two or three years—it was five years since Philip first met him in Heidelberg—and he was prematurely bald. He was very sensitive about it and wore his hair long to conceal the unsightly patch on the crown of his head. His only consolation was that his brow was now very noble. His blue eyes had lost their color; they had a listless droop; and his mouth, losing the fullness of youth, was weak and pale. He still talked vaguely of the things he was going to do in the future, but with less conviction; and he was conscious that his friends no longer believed in him: when he had drunk two or three glasses of whisky he was inclined to be elegiac.
“I’m a failure,” he murmured, “I’m unfit for the brutality of the struggle of life. All I can do is to stand aside and let the vulgar throng bustle by in their pursuit of the good things.”
He gave you the impression that to fail was a more delicate, a more exquisite thing than to succeed. He insinuated that his aloofness was due to distaste for all that was common and low. He talked beautifully of Plato.
“I should have thought you’d got through with Plato by now,” said Philip impatiently.
“Would you?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.
He was not inclined to pursue the subject. He had discovered of late the effective dignity of silence.
“I don’t see the use of reading the same thing over and over again,” said Philip. “That’s only a laborious form of idleness.”
“But are you under the impression that you have so great a mind that you can understand the most profound writer at a first reading?”
“I don’t want to understand him, I’m not a critic. I’m not interested in him for his sake but for mine.”
“Why d’you read then?”
“Partly for pleasure, because it’s a habit and I’m just as uncomfortable if I don’t read as if I don’t smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me; I’ve got out of the book all that’s any use to me, and I can’t get anything more if I read it a dozen times. You see, it seems to me, one’s like a closed bud, and most of what one reads and does has no effect at all; but there are certain things that have a peculiar significance for one, and they open a petal; and the petals open one by one; and at last the flower is there.”
Philip was not satisfied with his metaphor, but he did not know how else to explain a thing which he felt and yet was not clear about.
“You want to do things, you want to become things,” and Hayward, with a shrug of the shoulders. “It’s so vulgar.”
Philip knew Hayward very well by now. He was weak and vain, so vain that you had to be on the watch constantly not to hurt his feelings; he mingled idleness and idealism so that he could not separate them. At Lawson’s studio one day he met a journalist, who was charmed by his conversation, and a week later the editor of a paper wrote to suggest that he should do some criticism for him. For forty-eight hours Hayward lived in an agony of indecision. He had talked of getting occupation of this sort so long that he had not the face to refuse outright, but the thought of doing anything filled him with panic. At last he declined the offer and breathed freely.