Of Human Bondage (78 page)

  Towards the end of the year, when Philip was
bringing to a close his three months as clerk in the out-patients'
department, he received a letter from Lawson, who was in Paris.

  Dear Philip,

  Cronshaw is in London and would be glad to see you.
He is living at 43 Hyde Street, Soho. I don't know where it is, but
I daresay you will be able to find out. Be a brick and look after
him a bit. He is very down on his luck. He will tell you what he is
doing. Things are going on here very much as usual. Nothing seems
to have changed since you were here. Clutton is back, but he has
become quite impossible. He has quarrelled with everybody. As far
as I can make out he hasn't got a cent, he lives in a little studio
right away beyond the Jardin des Plantes, but he won't let anybody
see his work. He doesn't show anywhere, so one doesn't know what he
is doing. He may be a genius, but on the other hand he may be off
his head. By the way, I ran against Flanagan the other day. He was
showing Mrs. Flanagan round the Quarter. He has chucked art and is
now in popper's business. He seems to be rolling. Mrs. Flanagan is
very pretty and I'm trying to work a portrait. How much would you
ask if you were me? I don't want to frighten them, and then on the
other hand I don't want to be such an ass as to ask L150 if they're
quite willing to give L300.

Yours ever,

Frederick Lawson.

  Philip wrote to Cronshaw and received in reply the
following letter. It was written on a half-sheet of common
note-paper, and the flimsy envelope was dirtier than was justified
by its passage through the post.

  Dear Carey,

  Of course I remember you very well. I have an idea
that I had some part in rescuing you from the Slough of Despond in
which myself am hopelessly immersed. I shall be glad to see you. I
am a stranger in a strange city and I am buffeted by the
philistines. It will be pleasant to talk of Paris. I do not ask you
to come and see me, since my lodging is not of a magnificence fit
for the reception of an eminent member of Monsieur Purgon's
profession, but you will find me eating modestly any evening
between seven and eight at a restaurant yclept Au Bon Plaisir in
Dean Street.

Your sincere

J. Cronshaw.

  Philip went the day he received this letter. The
restaurant, consisting of one small room, was of the poorest class,
and Cronshaw seemed to be its only customer. He was sitting in the
corner, well away from draughts, wearing the same shabby great-coat
which Philip had never seen him without, with his old bowler on his
head.

  "I eat here because I can be alone," he said. "They
are not doing well; the only people who come are a few trollops and
one or two waiters out of a job; they are giving up business, and
the food is execrable. But the ruin of their fortunes is my
advantage."

  Cronshaw had before him a glass of absinthe. It was
nearly three years since they had met, and Philip was shocked by
the change in his appearance. He had been rather corpulent, but now
he had a dried-up, yellow look: the skin of his neck was loose and
winkled; his clothes hung about him as though they had been bought
for someone else; and his collar, three or four sizes too large,
added to the slatternliness of his appearance. His hands trembled
continually. Philip remembered the handwriting which scrawled over
the page with shapeless, haphazard letters. Cronshaw was evidently
very ill.

  "I eat little these days," he said. "I'm very sick
in the morning. I'm just having some soup for my dinner, and then I
shall have a bit of cheese."

  Philip's glance unconsciously went to the absinthe,
and Cronshaw, seeing it, gave him the quizzical look with which he
reproved the admonitions of common sense.

  "You have diagnosed my case, and you think it's very
wrong of me to drink absinthe."

  "You've evidently got cirrhosis of the liver," said
Philip.

  "Evidently."

  He looked at Philip in the way which had formerly
had the power of making him feel incredibly narrow. It seemed to
point out that what he was thinking was distressingly obvious; and
when you have agreed with the obvious what more is there to say?
Philip changed the topic.

  "When are you going back to Paris?"

  "I'm not going back to Paris. I'm going to die."

  The very naturalness with which he said this
startled Philip. He thought of half a dozen things to say, but they
seemed futile. He knew that Cronshaw was a dying man.

  "Are you going to settle in London then?" he asked
lamely.

  "What is London to me? I am a fish out of water. I
walk through the crowded streets, men jostle me, and I seem to walk
in a dead city. I felt that I couldn't die in Paris. I wanted to
die among my own people. I don't know what hidden instinct drew me
back at the last."

  Philip knew of the woman Cronshaw had lived with and
the two draggle-tailed children, but Cronshaw had never mentioned
them to him, and he did not like to speak of them. He wondered what
had happened to them.

  "I don't know why you talk of dying," he said.

  "I had pneumonia a couple of winters ago, and they
told me then it was a miracle that I came through. It appears I'm
extremely liable to it, and another bout will kill me."

  "Oh, what nonsense! You're not so bad as all that.
You've only got to take precautions. Why don't you give up
drinking?"

  "Because I don't choose. It doesn't matter what a
man does if he's ready to take the consequences. Well, I'm ready to
take the consequences. You talk glibly of giving up drinking, but
it's the only thing I've got left now. What do you think life would
be to me without it? Can you understand the happiness I get out of
my absinthe? I yearn for it; and when I drink it I savour every
drop, and afterwards I feel my soul swimming in ineffable
happiness. It disgusts you. You are a puritan and in your heart you
despise sensual pleasures. Sensual pleasures are the most violent
and the most exquisite. I am a man blessed with vivid senses, and I
have indulged them with all my soul. I have to pay the penalty now,
and I am ready to pay."

  Philip looked at him for a while steadily.

  "Aren't you afraid?"

  For a moment Cronshaw did not answer. He seemed to
consider his reply.

  "Sometimes, when I'm alone." He looked at Philip.
"You think that's a condemnation? You're wrong. I'm not afraid of
my fear. It's folly, the Christian argument that you should live
always in view of your death. The only way to live is to forget
that you're going to die. Death is unimportant. The fear of it
should never influence a single action of the wise man. I know that
I shall die struggling for breath, and I know that I shall be
horribly afraid. I know that I shall not be able to keep myself
from regretting bitterly the life that has brought me to such a
pass; but I disown that regret. I now, weak, old, diseased, poor,
dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing."

  "D'you remember that Persian carpet you gave me?"
asked Philip.

  Cronshaw smiled his old, slow smile of past
days.

  "I told you that it would give you an answer to your
question when you asked me what was the meaning of life. Well, have
you discovered the answer?"

  "No," smiled Philip. "Won't you tell it me?"

  "No, no, I can't do that. The answer is meaningless
unless you discover it for yourself."

  Cronshaw was publishing his poems. His friends had
been urging him to do this for years, but his laziness made it
impossible for him to take the necessary steps. He had always
answered their exhortations by telling them that the love of poetry
was dead in England. You brought out a book which had cost you
years of thought and labour; it was given two or three contemptuous
lines among a batch of similar volumes, twenty or thirty copies
were sold, and the rest of the edition was pulped. He had long
since worn out the desire for fame. That was an illusion like all
else. But one of his friends had taken the matter into his own
hands. This was a man of letters, named Leonard Upjohn, whom Philip
had met once or twice with Cronshaw in the cafes of the Quarter. He
had a considerable reputation in England as a critic and was the
accredited exponent in this country of modern French literature. He
had lived a good deal in France among the men who made the Mercure
de France the liveliest review of the day, and by the simple
process of expressing in English their point of view he had
acquired in England a reputation for originality. Philip had read
some of his articles. He had formed a style for himself by a close
imitation of Sir Thomas Browne; he used elaborate sentences,
carefully balanced, and obsolete, resplendent words: it gave his
writing an appearance of individuality. Leonard Upjohn had induced
Cronshaw to give him all his poems and found that there were enough
to make a volume of reasonable size. He promised to use his
influence with publishers. Cronshaw was in want of money. Since his
illness he had found it more difficult than ever to work steadily;
he made barely enough to keep himself in liquor; and when Upjohn
wrote to him that this publisher and the other, though admiring the
poems, thought it not worth while to publish them, Cronshaw began
to grow interested. He wrote impressing upon Upjohn his great need
and urging him to make more strenuous efforts. Now that he was
going to die he wanted to leave behind him a published book, and at
the back of his mind was the feeling that he had produced great
poetry. He expected to burst upon the world like a new star. There
was something fine in keeping to himself these treasures of beauty
all his life and giving them to the world disdainfully when, he and
the world parting company, he had no further use for them.

  His decision to come to England was caused directly
by an announcement from Leonard Upjohn that a publisher had
consented to print the poems. By a miracle of persuasion Upjohn had
persuaded him to give ten pounds in advance of royalties.

  "In advance of royalties, mind you," said Cronshaw
to Philip. "Milton only got ten pounds down."

  Upjohn had promised to write a signed article about
them, and he would ask his friends who reviewed to do their best.
Cronshaw pretended to treat the matter with detachment, but it was
easy to see that he was delighted with the thought of the stir he
would make.

  One day Philip went to dine by arrangement at the
wretched eating-house at which Cronshaw insisted on taking his
meals, but Cronshaw did not appear. Philip learned that he had not
been there for three days. He got himself something to eat and went
round to the address from which Cronshaw had first written to him.
He had some difficulty in finding Hyde Street. It was a street of
dingy houses huddled together; many of the windows had been broken
and were clumsily repaired with strips of French newspaper; the
doors had not been painted for years; there were shabby little
shops on the ground floor, laundries, cobblers, stationers. Ragged
children played in the road, and an old barrel-organ was grinding
out a vulgar tune. Philip knocked at the door of Cronshaw's house
(there was a shop of cheap sweetstuffs at the bottom), and it was
opened by an elderly Frenchwoman in a dirty apron. Philip asked her
if Cronshaw was in.

  "Ah, yes, there is an Englishman who lives at the
top, at the back. I don't know if he's in. If you want him you had
better go up and see."

  The staircase was lit by one jet of gas. There was a
revolting odour in the house. When Philip was passing up a woman
came out of a room on the first floor, looked at him suspiciously,
but made no remark. There were three doors on the top landing.
Philip knocked at one, and knocked again; there was no reply; he
tried the handle, but the door was locked. He knocked at another
door, got no answer, and tried the door again. It opened. The room
was dark.