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.”
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 dishonour
of such a love; and when he thought of Mildred it
was with angry hatred, because she had submitted 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 realised 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
any more 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 labour.
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
catalogue, saw that Lawson had a picture in it.
