Philip's wanderlust

Philip’s wanderlust is not merely a wish to visit distant countries: it is the imagined route by which he hopes to meet life directly, escape a future already mapped for him, and find a clue to questions he has not resolved. As his medical qualification approaches, he gives that longing an increasingly elaborate shape. The prospect of Sally’s possible pregnancy then tests whether travel is truly his deepest desire; when the suspicion proves mistaken, his response exposes how much he wants the home and love he had thought he might have to sacrifice.

The Pull Away from a Settled Future

Doctor South offers Philip a share in a medical practice bringing in about seven hundred pounds a year, with the prospect of succeeding him. Philip recognizes that many doctors would welcome such security. He nevertheless refuses: after years of working toward qualification, he wants the freedom it may give him to travel, and waking in the morning he feels an urgent need to get away, even without knowing exactly where he wants to go.

The contrast is between a dependable professional future and an open-ended one, not simply between work and leisure. Philip has spent years moving among different pursuits, but now that his hospital appointment is nearing its end, he sees travel as the next purpose to pursue. Doctor South does not press him to take the offer. Instead, he speaks of his own earlier life at sea, including journeys in the Pacific and adventures in China, which Philip listens to with rapt interest. The older doctor’s experiences make distant travel feel like a lived possibility rather than a vague escape.

Spain as a Beginning

Philip’s first destination is Spain, which he has already made intimate in imagination through its history, cities, literature, and painting. He pictures visiting Cordova, Seville, Toledo, Leon, Tarragona, and Burgos, and imagines encountering the Spanish painters whose work speaks to his own troubled, restless nature. The country seems to promise not just new scenery but a particular kind of understanding and strength. He expects his time there to prepare him for places more distant and unfamiliar.

That itinerary is selective even before the journey begins. Philip thinks Andalusia might be too soft and sensuous to satisfy him; his imagination turns instead toward the wind-swept reaches of Castile and the rugged landscapes of Aragon and Leon. The contrast shows how thoroughly he has invested travel with an inward significance. He is not simply collecting destinations: he anticipates that the character of each place will meet some need in him, though he cannot specify what the encounter will yield.

Routes Toward the Wider World

Spain is only the opening stage of a larger plan. Philip has contacted companies that carry surgeons aboard their ships and has studied their routes and the advantages and disadvantages of each service. He rules out the Orient and P&O: their berths are difficult to obtain, and passenger traffic would restrict a medical officer’s freedom. Instead he considers slower services whose large ships call at numerous ports, sometimes staying long enough for a journey inland.

These less sought-after posts offer low pay and merely adequate food, but Philip believes that a doctor with a London degree should have a good chance of securing one. With few passengers beyond occasional people travelling on business, shipboard life seems likely to be friendly and pleasant. He has memorized the ports of call; each brings to mind tropical sunshine, vivid colour, and an intense, unfamiliar life. From Tokyo or Shanghai, he imagines transferring to another line for the South Pacific, while Burma, Sumatra, and Borneo suggest further journeys inland. His hope is to travel for years, learn from different peoples and ways of life, and quiet the restlessness that has long troubled him. He does not claim to know what he is seeking or what he will find.

The Test of Sally’s Possible Pregnancy

When Sally fears she may be pregnant, Philip first tries to treat the news as an obstacle that should not alter his chosen course. His thoughts return at once to the arrangements he has made for travel, which had occupied him while he was settling into hospital work. He imagines that he could give Sally enough money to help her and compares himself with Griffiths, whom he supposes would leave the woman to manage her difficulty alone. Philip tells himself that what has happened is inevitable, that Sally knew the risks, and that a strong man would not allow an accident to divert him from his purpose.

Yet the argument does not persuade him. Although he insists to himself that he is not to blame and should keep to his plan, he knows he cannot leave Sally to face the consequences by herself. He calls himself weak, but the episode makes the meaning of his supposed resolve less straightforward: the journey he has represented as his overriding purpose cannot simply cancel his sense of responsibility to another person.

The test is reversed when Sally’s suspicion proves unfounded. Philip had been certain that she was right; now, with the obstacle removed, his imagined future collapses into something he will not live. Rather than feeling elated at being free to pursue his plans, he feels dismayed and lonely. The emotional force of the reversal reveals that the possibility of staying with Sally had already become more than a duty he meant to resist.

Travel, the Future, and the Life He Wants

After the false alarm, Philip recognizes that he has misdescribed his motives. He had thought that considering marriage would mean self-sacrifice, but discovers that he wants a wife, a home, and love more than the adventures he had pictured. Spain and its cities, Asian journeys, and islands in the South Seas lose their hold beside what he understands as a desire for the present life with Sally. The revelation is not that travel was insincere: its routes and hopes had been carefully developed. It is that he had treated an idealized future as a substitute for acknowledging what he wanted now.

Philip connects that discovery to a long habit of living in anticipation. He has repeatedly been guided by what he thought he ought to do, or by ideals absorbed from other people, while the present slipped past. His image of making a beautiful design from life’s many meaningless facts changes accordingly. He can now see the ordinary sequence of being born, working, marrying, having children, and dying as a pattern no less complete than one fashioned from exceptional experiences. The ending of the episode therefore qualifies rather than simply cancels his wanderlust: travel promised discovery and freedom, but Philip comes to recognize that the life he had treated as a defeat may be the life he most wants.

Sally knows that travel has mattered to him. She asks about Spain and the journeys beyond it, explaining that she has heard him and her father discuss them repeatedly. Her question brings the competing futures into the open: Philip’s imagined passage across distant countries, and the possibility of choosing a shared ordinary life at home. The episode leaves the journey as a genuine unrealized desire, but it also changes what Philip believes the desire means.