When he came to himself he thought with a precision and clarity that amounted almost to vision of his first arrival at Oxford, saw himself eagerly,shyly, stepping down from the train and hurrying through the crowd of other young men, eager and shy, and meeting school acquaintances. He remembered with singular acuteness the pang of shame he had felt on encountering Blazering who was going to Magdalen while he himself was a scholar of Lincoln. He pursued the stripling who had been himself out of the station and up past the gaol, feeling amazingly, blissfully youthful when he put up his hand and found a stiff beard upon his chin. Gone was the vision of Oxford, gone the sensation of youth, and he realized that he was in bed in a stranger’s room, which, without his glasses, he could not see distinctly. There was a woman by his bedside, a stout woman, with a strong light behind her, so that he could not distinguish her features. It was a very little room, low in the ceiling. The smell of it was good. It had one small window, which was open, and through it there came up the hubbub of voices and the grinding beat and blare of a mechanical organ that repeated one tune so quickly that it seemed always to be afraid it would not have time to reach the end before it began again. The woman was knitting. He tried to remember who she might be, but failing, and feeling mortified at his failure, he consoled himself with the reflection that he was ill—ill-in-bed, one of the marked degrees of sickness among schoolboys. How ill? He had never been ill in his life.“Can I have my spectacles?” he said.“Oh!” The knitting in the woman’s hands wentclattering to the floor. “Lor’! Mr. Mole, you did give me a start. I shall have the palpitations, same as my mother. My mother had the palpitations for forty years and then she died of something else.”“If I had my spectacles I could see who it is speaking.”“It’s Mrs. Copas. Don’t you know me, Mr. Mole?”“I—er. I . . . . This is your house?”“It’s lodgings, Mr. Mole. You’ve been sick, Mr. Mole, you have. Prostrated on your back for nearly a week, Mr. Mole. You did give us all a turn, falling off the caravan like that into the King’s high road. You’d never believe the pool of blood you left in the road, Mr. Mole. But it soon dried up. . . .”He began to have a glimmering, dimly to remember, a road, a caravan, a horse’s tail, dust, a droning voice behind him, but still the name of Copas meant nothing to him.“Copas! Copas!” he said to himself, but aloud.Mrs. Copas produced the spectacles and placed them on his nose. Then she leaned over him in his bed and in the loud indulgent voice with which the unafflicted humor the deaf, she said:“Yes! Mrs. Copas. Matilda’s aunt.You know.”That brought the whole adventure flooding back.Matilda! The girl who wanted to speak properly, the girl whom he had found in the smelly little theater. No! Not in the theater! In the train! He writhed and went hot, and his head began tothrob, and he felt a strange want of coördination among the various parts of his body.“I’m afraid,” he said, “I’m afraid Iamill.”“There! There!” said Mrs. Copas. “We’ll soon pull you round. I’m used to the nursing; not that Mr. Copas is ever ill. He says a nartist can’t afford to be ill, but we had a comic once who used to have fits.”“It’s very good of you. I must have been an incubus. I’m sure I must be taking you away from the theater.”“We’ve got a new tune on the organ and we’re doing splendid business. Mr. Copaswillbe glad to hear you’ve asked for your spectacles. . . . Doctor says you mustn’t talk.”And, indeed, he had lost all desire to do so. His head ached so that he could not keep his eyes open, nor think, nor hear anything but a confused buzz, and he sank back into the luxury of feeling sorry for himself.Nothing broke in upon that sensation until suddenly the organ stopped. That startled him and set him listening. In the distance, muffled, he could hear the huge booming voice of Mr. Copas, but not what he said.“Nice people,” he thought. “Nice kind people.”There were three medicine bottles by his bed-side. They suddenly caught his eye and he gazed at them long and carefully. One was full and two were half empty. Their contents were brown, reddish, and white.“I must be very ill,” he said to himself mournfully. There darted in on him a feeling of fun. “No one knows! I am ill and no one knows. Not a soul knows. They won’t know. They won’t ever know.”That seemed to settle it. “They” sank away. He hurled defiance after them, opened, as it were, a trap-door in the past, and gloated over the sight of “them” hurtling down and down. He felt better after that. The pain in his head was almost gone. His bed seemed to be floating, drifting, turning on the tide, while it was moored to Mrs. Copas. He gazed at her and saw in her the comfortable, easy, hovering present. He had only to cut the painter to drift out into the wide future. When he opened his mouth to tell Mrs. Copas that he remembered her perfectly she laid her finger on her lips and said “Ssh!” and when he insisted on grunting out a word, she smacked the back of her fat hand roguishly and cried:“Naughty!”At that he giggled helplessly and went on giggling until he was near crying.“Histrionics!” said Mrs. Copas, and gave him brandy.Matilda appeared at the door and was pushed out. At that Mr. Mole, who had seen her, began to weep and sobbed like a disappointed child, and went on sobbing until Matilda was allowed to come in and sit by his side. She sat on the bed, and he stopped his sobbing as abruptly as a horse willcome to a standstill after a mad sunset gallop. Mrs. Copas left them.Matilda sat stroking her cheek and gazing at him. She cocked her head on one side and said:“Glad you’re better, but I don’t like men with beards. Napoleon didn’t have a beard.”“How do you know?”“I bought a book about him for a penny. I like Josephine.”“I don’t know much about it, but I always felt sorry for her.”“She gave as good as she got. That’s why I like her. . . . I had a part to do to-night.”“A long part?”“No. I just had to say to uncle, ‘Won’t you give her another chance?’ His erring wife had just returned to him.”“Did you do it well?”“No. Uncle said no one who wasn’t at the back of the stage could hear me.”“Oh! Did you like it?”“Yes. I felt funny like.”Mr. Mole coughed. Matilda stopped.“What did I say?”“Funny like.”“Don’t people say that?”“It is unusual.”“Oh!”“I wasn’t a bit nervous. Uncle says that’s a bad sign. He says I looked all right, though I’m sure I was an object with that paint stuff on my face andthe red all in the wrong place. Aunt wouldn’t let me do it myself. . . . You will cut your beard off?”“I don’t know. I might like it.”She handed him a mirror, and mischief danced in her eyes as she watched his disconcerted expression. “Bit of a surprise, eh?”He could find nothing to say. Impossible for him to lay the mirror down. For years he had accepted a certain idea of his personal appearance—ruddy, heavy-jowled, with a twinkle behind spectacles surmounted by a passably high forehead that was furrowed by the lines of a frown almost deliberately cultivated for the purposes of inspiring terror in small boys delinquent. Now, in the sharpened receptivity of his issue from unconsciousness, his impression was one of roundness, round face, round eyes, round brow, round head (balder than he had thought)—all accentuated by the novelty of his beard, that was gray, almost white. Age and roundness. Fearful of meeting Matilda’s gaze, he went on staring into the mirror. Her youth, the fun bubbling up in her, reproached him, made him feel defenceless against her, and, though he delighted in her presence, he was resentful. She had so many precious qualities to which he could not respond.“I ’spect I must go now,” she said.“Yes. I’m rather tired.”She took the mirror from him, patted his hand, and soothed him, saying:“You’ll soon be up and doing, and then you’ll begin to teach me, won’t you?”“How would it be if you came and read to me every evening before the play? Then we could begin at once.”“Shall I?” She warmed to the plan. “What shall I read?”“You might read your book about Napoleon.”“Oh! Lovely!”Mrs. Copas returned to give him his medicine and to tuck him up for the night.“What day is it?” he asked.“Saturday.”“Are there any letters for me?” He remembered then that there could be none, that he was no longer his old self, that an explosion in his affairs had hurled him out of his old habitual existence and left him bruised and broken among strangers.“I would like,” he said, “to shave to-morrow.”“Yes, yes,” replied Mrs. Copas, humoring him. “I’m in the next room if you want anything. Doctor said you was to have as much sleep as you could get. Being Saturday night, and you an invalid, Mr. Copas bought you some grapes and sponge-cake, and he wants to know if you’d like some port wine. We thought it ’ud make you sleep.”He expressed a desire for port, and she bustled into the next room and came back with a tumblerful. He was, or fancied he was, something of a connoisseur, and he propped himself up and sippedthe dark liquid, and, as he was wont, rolled it round his tongue. It tasted of ink and pepper. He wanted to spit it out, but, blinking up at Mrs. Copas, he saw the good creature beaming at him in rapt indulgence, and could not bring himself to offend her. With his gorge rising he sipped down about a third of the tumbler’s contents and then feebly, miserably held it out toward her.“A bit strong for you?”He nodded, drew the bed-clothes up over his shoulders and feigned sleep. The light was put out and he heard Mrs. Copas creep into the next room. Sleep? The fiery liquor sent the blood racing and throbbing through his veins. The palms of his hands were dry and hot, and his head seemed to be bulging out of its skin. His ears were alert to every sound, and to every sound his nerves responded with a thrill. He could hear footsteps on the cobbles of the street outside, voices, hiccoughs, a woman’s voice singing. These were the accompaniment to nearer sounds, a duet in the next room, a deep bass muttering, and a shrill argumentative treble. The bass swelled into anger. The treble roared into pleading. The bass became a roar, the treble a squeak. It was exciting, exasperating. In his bed Beenham tossed from side to side. He did not want to listen to their altercation, but sleep would not come to him. The bass voice broke into a crackling; then spluttering, furious sounds came. The treble squealed pitifully. Came the thud and smack of a fist on flesh and bone, a gasp, a whine,a whimper, another thud and smack, and growls from the bass, then silence. . . .Sick at heart Old Mole lay in his bed staring, staring into the darkness, and the blood in him boiled and bubbled, and his skin was taut and he shivered. He had heard of men beating their wives, but as one hears of the habits of wild animals in African forests; he had thought of it as securely as here in England one may think of a man-eating tiger near an Indian village. Now, here, in the next room, the thing had happened. Manliness, that virtue which at school had been held up as the highest good, bade him arise and defend the woman. In theory manliness had always had things perfectly its own way. In practice, now, sound sense leaped ahead of virtue, counted the cost and accurately gauged the necessity of action. In the first place to defend Mrs. Copas would mean an intrusion into the sanctuary of human life, the conjugal chamber; in the second place, in spite of many familiar pictures of St. George of Cappadocia (subsequently of England), it would be embarrassing to defend Mrs. Copas in her night attire; in the third place, the assault had grown out of their altercation of which he had heard nothing whatever; and, lastly, it might be a habit with Mr. and Mrs. Copas to smite and be smitten. Therefore Old Mole remained in his bed, faintly regretting the failure of manliness, fighting down his emotion of disgust, and endeavoring to avoid having to face his position. In vain: shunning all further thoughtof the miserable couple in the next room, he was driven back upon himself, to his wretched wondering:“What have I done?”He had thrown up his very pleasant life in Thrigsby and Bigley, a life, after all, of some consequence, for what? . . . For the society of a disreputable strolling player who was blind with conceit, was apt to get drunk on Saturday nights, and in that condition violently to assault the wife of his bosom. And he had entered into this adventure with enthusiasm, had seen their life as romantic and adventurous, deliberately closing his eyes to the brutality and squalor of it. Thud, whack! and there were the raw facts staring him in the face.There came a little moaning from the next room: never a sound from the bass: and soon all was still, save for the mice in the skirting board and occasional footsteps on the cobbles of the street outside.No sleep came to Old Mole until the pale light of dawn crept into his room to show him, shivering, its meanness and poverty. It sickened him, but when in reaction he came to consider his old mode of living that seemed so paltry as to give a sort of savor to the coarseness of this. . . . Anyhow, he reflected, he was tied to his bed, could not take any action, and must wait upon circumstance, and hope only that there might not be too many violent shocks in store for him.Mrs. Copas bore the marks of her husband’s attentions:a long bruise over her right eye and down to the cheek-bone, and a cut on her upper lip which had swelled into an unsightly protuberance. Her spirit seemed to be entirely unaffected, and she beamed upon him from behind her temporary deformities. When she asked him if he had slept well, he lied and said he had slept like a top.She brought him hot water, razor, brush and soap, and he shaved. Off came his beard, and, after long scrutiny of his appearance in the mirror and timid hesitation, he removed the moustache which had been his pride and anxiety during his second year at Oxford, since when it had been his constant and unobtrusive companion. The effect was startling. His upper lip was long and had, if the faces of great men be any guide, the promise of eloquence. There was a new expression in his face, of boldness, of firmness, of—as he phrased it himself—benevolent obstinacy. His changed countenance gave him so much pleasure that he spent the morning gazing into the mirror at different angles. With such a brow, such an upper lip, such lines about the nose and chin, it seemed absurd that he should have spent twenty-five years as an assistant master in a secondary school. Then he laughed at himself as he realized that he was behaving as he had not done since the ambitious days at Oxford when he had endeavored to decide on a career. Ruefully he remembered that in point of fact he had not decided. With a second in Greats he had taken the first appointment that turned up. His historyhad been the history of thousands. One thing only he had escaped—marriage, the ordinary timid, matter-of-fact, sugar-coated marriage upon means that might or might not prove sufficient. After that, visiting his friends’ houses, he had sighed sentimentally, but, with all the eligible women of his acquaintance—and they were not a few—he had been unable to avoid a quizzical tone which forbade the encouragement of those undercurrents upon which, he had observed, middle-aged men were swept painlessly into matrimony. . . . Pondering his clean-shaven face in the mirror he felt oddly youthful and excited.In the evening Matilda came as she had promised, with the book, which proved to be that Life of Napoleon by Walter Scott which so incensed Heine. The sun shone in at the window upon the girl’s brown hair, and as she opened the book the church bells began to ring with such an insistent buzzing that it was impossible for her to read. As he lay in bed Old Mole thought of Heine lying in his mattress-grave, being visited by hisMouche,just such another charming creature as this, young and ardent, and by her very presence soothing; only he was no poet, but a man dulled by years of unquestioning service. He gazed at Matilda as he could not recollect ever having gazed at a woman, critically, but with warm interest. There was a kind of bloom on her, the fragrance and graciousness that, when he had encountered it as a young man, had produced in him a delicious blurring of the senses,an almost intoxication wherein dreadfully he had lost sight of the individual in the possession of them, and considered her only as woman. Now his subjection to the spell only heightened his sense of Matilda’s individuality and sharpened his curiosity about her. Also it stripped him of his preoccupation with himself and his own future, and he fell to considering hers and wondering what the world might hold for her. . . . Like most men he had his little stock of generalizations about women, how they were mysterious, capricious, cruel, unintelligent, uncivilized, match-making, tactless, untruthful, etc., but to Matilda he could not apply them. He wanted to know exactly how she personally felt, thought, saw, moved, lived, and he refused to make any assumption about her. This curiosity of his was not altogether intellectual: it was largely physical, and it grew. He was annoyed that he had not seen her come into the room to mark how she walked, and to procure this satisfaction he asked her to give him a glass of water. He watched her. She walked easily with, for a woman, a long stride and only a very slight swing of the hips, and a drag of the arms that pleased him mightily. As she gave him the glass of water she said:“You do look nice. I knew you would, without that moustache.”She had a strong but pleasant North-Country accent, and in her voice there was a faint huskiness that he found very moving, though it was only later, when he analyzed the little thrills which dartedabout him in all his conversations with her, that he set it down to her voice. . . . She resumed her seat by the foot of his bed with her book in her hand, and his physical curiosity waxed only the greater from the satisfaction he had given it. He could find no excuse for more, and when the bells ceased he took refuge in talk.“Where were you born, Matilda?”“In a back street,” she said. “Father was a fitter, and mother was a dressmaker, but she died, and father got the rheumatism, so as we all ’ad—had—to work. There was——”“Were.” She blushed and looked very cross.“Were three girls and two boys. Jim has gone to Canada, and George is on the railway, and both my sisters are married, one in the country, and one in Yorkshire. I’m the youngest.”“Did you go to school?”“Oh! yes. Jackson Street, but I left when I was fourteen to go into a shop. That was sitting still all day and stitching, or standing all day behind a counter with women coming in and getting narked——”“Getting what?”“Narked—cross-like.”“I see. So you didn’t care about that?”“No. There is something in me here”—she laid her hand on her bosom—“that goes hot and hard when I’m not treated fair, and then I don’t care a brass farthing what ’appens.”She was too excited as she thought of her oldwrongs to correct the last dropped aitch, though she realized it and bit her lip.“I been in service three years now, and I’ve been in four places. I’ve had enough.”“And what now?”“I shall stop ’ere as long as you do.”Something in her tone, a greater huskiness, perhaps, surprised him, and he looked up at her and met her eyes full. He was confused and amazed and startled, and his heart grew big within him, but he could not turn away. In her expression there was a mingling of fierce strength, defiance, and that helplessness which had originally overcome him and led to his undoing. He was frightened, but deliciously, so that he liked it.“I didn’t know,” she said, “that uncle drank. Father drank, too. There was a lot in our street that did. I’m not frightened of many things, but I am of that.”He resented the topic on her lips and, by way of changing the subject, suggested that she should read. She turned to her book and read aloud the first five pages in a queer, strained, high-pitched voice that he knew for a product of the Board School, where every variance of the process called education is a kind of stiff drill. When she came to the end of a paragraph he took the book and read to her, and she listened raptly, for his diction was good. After he had come to the end of the first chapter she asked for the book again and produced a rather mincing but wonderfully accurate copy of his manner.She did not wait for his comment but banged the book shut, threw it on the bed, and said:“That’s better. I knew I could do it. I knew I was clever. . . . You’ll stop ’ere for a bit when you’re better. You mustn’t mind uncle. I’ll be awfully nice to you, I will. I’ll be a servant to you and make you comfortable, and I won’t ask for no wages. . . .”“My dear child,” replied Old Mole, “you can’t possibly have enjoyed it more than I.”She was eager on that.“Did you really, really like it?”“I did really.”So began the education of Matilda. At first he drew up, for his own use, a sort of curriculum—arithmetic, algebra, geography, history, literature, grammar, orthography—and a time-table, two hours a day for six days in the week, but he very soon found that she absolutely refused to learn anything that did not interest her, and that he had to adapt his time to hers. Sometimes she would come to him for twenty minutes; sometimes she would devote the whole afternoon to him. When they had galloped through Oman’s “History of England” she declined to continue that study, and after one lesson in geography she burned the primer he had sent her out to buy. When he asked her where Ipswich was she turned it over in her mind, decided that it had a foreign sound and plumpedfor Germany. She did not seem to mind in the least when he told her it was in England, in the Eastern Counties. . . . On the other hand, when he procured their itinerary for the next few months from Mr. Copas and marked it out on the map for her, she was keenly interested and he seized on the occasion to point out Ipswich and, having engaged her attention, all the county towns of England and Scotland.“Where were you born?” she asked.He found the village in Lincolnshire.“And did you go to a boarding-school?”He pointed to Haileybury and then to Oxford. From there he took her down the river to London, and told her how it was the capital of the greatest Empire the world had ever seen, and how the Mother of Parliaments sat by the river and made decrees for half the world, and how the King lived in an ugly palace within sight of the Mother of Parliaments, and how it was the greatest of ports, and how in Westminster Abbey all the noblest of men lay buried. She was not interested and asked:“Where’s the Crystal Palace, where they play the Cup-tie?”He did not know where in London, or out of it, the Crystal Palace might be, and she was delighted to find a gap in his knowledge. On the whole she took her lessons very seriously, and he found that he could get her to apply herself to almost any subject if he promised that at the end of it she shouldbe allowed to read. . . . Teaching under these circumstances he found more difficult than ever he had imagined it could be. In his Form-room by the glass roof of the gymnasium he had been backed by tradition, the ground had been prepared for him in the lower Forms; there was the whole complicated machinery of the school to give him weight and authority. Further, the subjects of instruction were settled for him by the Oxford and Cambridge Examination Board. Now he was somewhat nettled to find that, though he might draw up and amend curricula, he was more and more forced to take the nature and extent of his teaching from his pupil, who, having no precise object in view, followed only her instinct, and that seemed to bid her not so much to lay up stores of knowledge as to disencumber herself, to throw out ballast, everything that impeded the buoyancy of her nature.They were very pleasant hours for both of them, and in her company he learned to give as little thought to the future as she. At first, after he recovered, he fidgeted because there were no letters. Day after day passed and brought him no communication from the outside world. Being a member of many committees and boards, he was used to a voluminous if uninteresting post. However, he got used to their absence, and what with work in the theater and teaching Matilda he had little time for regret or anxiety. He had been up from his bed a whole week before he bought a newspaper, that which he had been in the habit ofreading in his morning train. It was dull and only one announcement engaged his attention; the advertisement of the school setting forth the fees and the opening date of the next term—September 19. That gave him four weeks in which freely to enjoy his present company. Thereafter surely there would be investigation, inquiry for him, the scandal would reach his relatives and they would—would they not?—cause a search for him. Till then he might be presumed to be holiday-making.Meanwhile he had grown used to Mr. Copas’s manner of living—the dirt, the untidiness, the coarse food, the long listlessness of the day, the excitement and feverishness of the evening. Mrs. Copas’s disfigurements were long in healing, and when he was well enough he replaced her at the door and took the money, and sold the grimy-thumbed tickets for the front seats. He sat through every performance and became acquainted with every item in Mr. Copas’s repertory. With that remarkable person he composed a version of “Iphigenia,” for from his first sketch of the play Mr. Copas had had his eye on Agamemnon as a part worthy of his powers. Mr. Mole insisted that Matilda should play the part of Iphigenia, and Mrs. Copas was given Clytemnestra wherewith to do her worst. . . . The only portion of the piece that was written was Iphigenia’s share of her scenes with Agamemnon. These Old Mole wrote out in as good prose as he could muster, and she learned them by heart. Unfortunately they were too long for Mr. Copas, andwhen it came to performance—there were only two rehearsals—he burst into them with his gigantic voice and hailed tirades at his audience about the bitterness of ingratitude in a fair and favorite daughter, trounced Clytemnestra for the lamentable upbringing she had given their child, and, in the end, deprived Iphigenia of the luxury of slaughter by falling on his sword and crying:“Thus like a Roman and a most unhappy father I die of thrice and doubly damned, self-inflicted wounds. By my example let all men, especially my daughter, know there is a canon fixed against self-slaughter.”He made nonsense of the whole thing, but it was wonderfully effective. So far as it was at all lucid the play seemed to represent Agamemnon as a wretched man driven to a miserable end by a shrewish wife and daughter.Much the same fate attended Mr. Mole’s other contribution to the repertory, a Napoleonic drama in which Mr. Copas figured—immensely to his own satisfaction—as the Corsican torn between an elderly and stout Marie Louise and a youthful and declamatory Josephine. Through five acts Mr. Copas raged and stormed up and down the Emperor’s career, had scenes with Josephine and Marie Louise when he felt like it, confided his troubles and ambitions to Murat when he wanted a rest from his ranting, sacked countries, cities, ports as easily and neatly as you or I might pocket the red at billiards, made ponderous love to the golden-hairedlady of the Court, introduced comic scenes with the lugubrious young man, wept over the child, dressed up as L’Aiglon, whom he called “Little Boney,” banished Josephine from the Court, and died on the battlefield of Waterloo yielding up his sword to the Duke of Wellington, represented by Mr. Mole, his first appearance upon any stage, with this farewell:“My last word to England is—be good to Josephine.”It was the Theater Royal’s most successful piece. The inhabitants of that little Staffordshire town had heard of the Duke of Wellington and they applauded him to the echo. Every night when they played that stirring drama, after Mr. Copas had taken his fill of the applause, there were calls for the Duke, and Mr. Mole would appear leading Josephine by the hand.At the top of their success Mr. Copas decided to move on.“In this business,” he said, “you have to know when to go. You have to leave ’em ripe for the next visit, and go away and squeeze another orange. I said to Mrs. Copas, the night you came, that you looked like luck. You’ve done it. If you’ll stay, sir, I’ll give you a pound a week. You’re a nartist, you are. That Wellington bit of yours without a word to say—d’you know what we call that? We call that ’olding the stage. It takes a nartist to do that.”Mr. Mole took this praise with becoming modestyand said that he would stay, for the present. Then he added:“And about Matilda?”“She’s my own niece,” replied Mr. Copas, “but I don’t mind telling you that she’s not a bit o’ good. She ain’t got the voice. She ain’t got the fizzikew. When there’s a bit o’ real acting to be done, she isn’t there. She just isn’t there. There’s a hole where she ought to be. I’m bothered about that girl, I am, bothered. She doesn’t earn her keep.”“I thought she was very charming.”“Pretty and all that, but that’s not acting. Set her against Mrs. Copas and where is she?”Mr. Mole’s own private opinion was that on the stage Mrs. Copas was repulsive. However, he kept that to himself. Very quietly he said:“If Matilda goes, I go.”Mr. Copas looked very mysterious and winked at him vigorously. Then he grinned and held out a dirty hand.“Put it there, my boy, put it there. What’s yours?”Within half an hour he had coaxed another ten pounds out of Mr. Mole’s pocket and Matilda’s tenure of the part of Josephine was guaranteed.At their next stopping-place, on the outskirts of the Pottery towns, disaster awaited the company. A wheel of the caravan jammed as they were going down a hill and delayed them for some hours, sothat they arrived too late in the evening to give a performance. Mr. Copas insisted that the theater should be erected, and lashed his assistants with bitter and blasphemous words, so that they became excited and flurried and made a sad muddle of their work. When at last it was finished and Mr. Copas went out himself to post up his bills on the walls of the neighborhood, where of all places he regarded his fame as most secure, he had got no farther than the corner of the square when he came on a gleaming white building that looked as though it were made of icing sugar, glittering and dazzling with electric light and plastered all over with lurid pictures of detectives and criminals and passionate men and women in the throes of amorous catastrophes and dilemmas. He stopped outside this place and stared it up and down, gave it his most devastating fore-and-aft look, and uttered one word:“Blast!”Then unsteadily he made for the door of the public-house adjoining it and called for the landlord, whom he had known twenty years and more. From the platform of the theater Mrs. Copas saw him go in, and she rushed to find Mr. Mole, and implored him to deliver her husband from the seven devils who would assuredly possess him unless he were speedily rescued and sent a-billposting.Mr. Mole obeyed, and found the actor storming at the publican, asking him how he dare take the bread from the belly and the air from the nostrils of a nartist with a lot o’ dancing dotty pictures.With difficulty Mr. Copas was soothed and placated. He had ordered a glass of beer in order to give himself a status in the house, and the publican would not let him pay for it. Whereupon he spilled it on the sanded floor and stalked out. Mr. Mole followed him and found him brooding over a poster outside the “kinema” which represented a lady in the act of saving her child from a burning hotel. He seized his paste-pot, took out a bill from his satchel, and covered the heads of the lady and her child with the announcement of his own arrival with new plays and a brilliant and distinguished company.When he was safely round the corner he seized his companion by the arm and said excitedly:“Ruining the country they are with them things. Last time I pitched opposite one o’ them, when they ought to have been working my own company was in there watching the pictures.”“I have always understood,” replied Mr. Mole, “that they have a considerable educational value, and certainly it seems to me that through them the people can come by a more accurate knowledge of the countries and customs of the world than by reading or verbal instruction.”Mr. Copas snorted:“Have youseen’em?”“No.”“Then talk when you have. I say it’s ruining the country and pampering the public. Who wants to know about the countries and customs of the world?What men and women want to know is the workings of the human heart.”Unexpectedly Mr. Mole found himself reduced to triteness. The only comment that presented itself to his mind was that the human heart was a mystery beyond knowing, but that did not allow him to controvert the actor’s dictum that no one wanted to know about the countries and customs of the world, and he wondered whether the kinematograph did, in fact, convey a more accurate impression of the wonders of the world than Hakluyt or Sir John Mandeville, who did, at any rate, present the results of their travels and inventions with that pride in both truth and lying which begets style.He determined to visit the kinematograph, and after he and Mr. Copas had completed their round and made it possible for a large number of the inhabitants of the Potteries to become aware of their existence, he returned to the Theater Royal and fetched Matilda. They paid threepence each and sat in the best seats in the middle of the hall, where they were regaled with a Wild West melodrama, an adventure of Max Linder, a Shakespearean production by a famous London actor, a French drama of love and money, and a picture of bees making honey in their hive. Matilda liked the bees and the horses in the Wild West melodrama. When Max Linder climbed into a piano and the hammers hit him on the nose and eyes she laughed; but she said the French drama was silly, and as for the Shakespearean production she said:“You can’t follow the play, but I suppose it’s good for you.”“How do you mean—good for you?”“I mean you don’t really like it, but there’s a lot of it, and a lot of people, and the dresses are lovely. It doesn’t get hold of you like uncle does sometimes.”“Your uncle says the kinemas are ruining the country.”“Oh! He only means they’re making business bad for him.”“Your uncle says you’ll never make an actress, Matilda.”“Does he?”(Some one behind them said “Ssh!”“Ssh yourself,” retorted Matilda. “There ain’t nothing to hear.”)“Does he?” she said. “What doyouthink?”“I’m afraid I don’t know much about it.”For the first time he noted that when he was with Matilda his brain worked in an entirely novel fashion. It was no longer cool and fastidiously analytical, seizing on things and phenomena from the outside, but strangely excited and heated, athletic and full of energy and almost rapturously curious about the inside of things and their relation one with another. For instance, he had hitherto regarded the kinematograph as a sort of disease that had broken out all over the face of the world, but now his newly working mind, his imagination—that was the word for it—saw it as human effort, as a thing controlledby human wills to meet human demands. It did not satisfy his own demand, nor apparently did it satisfy Matilda’s. For the rest of the audience he would not venture to decide. Indeed he gave little thought to them, for he was entirely absorbed by the wonder of the miracle that had come to him, the new vision of life, the novel faculty of apprehension. He was in a state of ferment and could not sort his impressions and ideas, but he was quite marvelously interested in himself, and, casting about for expression of it all, he remembered stories of seeds buried for years under mighty buildings in cities and how when the buildings were pulled down those seeds put forth with new vigor and came to flower. So (he said to himself) it had been with him. Excitedly he turned to Matilda and said:“About this acting. Do you yourself think you can do it?”“I’m sure I can.”“Then you shall.”The lights in the hall went up to indicate the end of the cycle of pictures.All that night and through the next day his exaltation continued, and then suddenly it vanished, leaving him racked by monstrous doubts. His mind, the full exercise of which had given him such thrilling delight, seemed to become parched and shriveled as a dried pea. Where had been heldout for him the promise of fine action was now darkness, and he sank deeper and deeper into a muddy inertia. Fear possessed him and brought him to agony, dug into his sides with its spur, drove him floundering on, and when out of the depths of his soul he strove to squeeze something of that soaring energy that had visited him or been struck out of him (he knew not which it was) he could summon nothing more powerful to his aid than anger. He wept tears of anger—anger at the world, at himself, and the blind, aimless force of events, at his own impotence to move out of the bog, at the folly and obstinacy which had led him to submit to the affront that had been put upon him by men who for years had been his colleagues and comrades. His anger was blown to a white heat by disgust when he looked back and counted the years he had spent in fatted security mechanically plying a mechanical profession, shut out by habit and custom from both imaginative power and the impotence of exhaustion. He raged and stormed and blubbered, and he marveled at the commotion going on within him as he pursued his daily tasks, read aloud with Matilda, argued with Mr. Copas, took money at the door of the theater in the evening, sat among the dirty, smelling, loutish audience. In his bitterness he found a sort of comfort in reverting to his old bantering attitude toward women, to find it a thousand times intensified. More than half the audience were women, poor women, meanly dressed, miserably corseted; the fat women bulgedand heaved out of their corsets, and the thin women looked as though they had been dropped into theirs and were only held up by their armpits. There they sat, hunched and bunched, staring, gaping, giggling, moping, chattering, chattering . . . Ach! They were silly.And the men? God save us! these sodden, stupid clods were men. They slouched and sprawled and yawned and spat. Their hands were dirty, their teeth yellow, and their speech was thick, clipped, guttural, inhuman. . . . Driven on by a merciless logic he was forced into consideration of himself. As he sat there at the end of the front row he turned his hands over and over; fat, stumpy hands they were, and he put them up and felt the fleshiness of his neck, the bushy hair growing out of his ears, and he ran them along his plump legs and prodded the stoutness of his belly. He laughed at himself. He laughed at the whole lot of them. And he tried to remember a single man or a single woman whom he had encountered in his life and could think of as beautiful. Not one.He turned his attention to the stage. Copas was almost a dwarf, a strutting, conceited little dwarf, pouring out revolting nonsense, a hideous caricature of human beings who were the caricatures of creation. He said to himself:“I must get out of this.”And he found himself using a phrase he had employed for years in dealing with small boys whoproduced slovenly work and wept when he railed at them:“Tut! Tut! This will never do!”At that he gasped. He was using the phrase to himself! He was therefore like a small boy in the presence of outraged authority, and that authority was (words came rushing in on him) his own conscience, his own essence, liberated, demanding, here and now, among men and women as they are, the very fullness of life.He had not regained his mood of delight, but rather had reached the limit of despair, had ceased blindly and uselessly to struggle, but cunningly, cautiously began to urge his way out of his despond. Whatever happened, he must move forward. Whatever happened, he must know, discover, reach out and grasp.And he blessed the illumination that had come to him, blessed also the blackness and misery into which, incontinently, he had fallen. He submitted to exhaustion and was content to await an accretion of energy.Thereafter, for a little while, he found himself more akin to Mr. Copas, drank with him, cracked jokes with him, walked with him and listened to his talk. He began to appreciate Mrs. Copas and to understand that being beaten by a man is not incompatible with a genuine affection and sympathy for him. He speculated not at all, and more than ever his instruction of Matilda became dependent upon her caprice.Her uncle now gave her a salary of five shillings a week and upon her first payment she went out and bought a cigar for her mentor. She gave three half-pence for it and he smoked it and she wore the band on her little finger. To guard against such presents in the future he bought himself a box of fifty Manilas.Mrs. Copas began to sound him as to his resources. Losing patience with his evasions she asked him at last bluntly if he were rich. He turned his cigar round his tongue and said:“It depends what you mean by rich.”“Well,” she replied cautiously, feeling her ground, “could you lay your hands on fifty pounds without selling anything?”“Certainly I could, or a hundred.”“A hundred pounds!”Her eyes and mouth made three round O’s and she was silenced.Both were astonished and both sat, rather awkwardly, adjusting their financial standards. She took up her knitting and he plied his cigar. They were sitting on boxes outside the stage door in the warm August sunlight. She gave a discreet little cough and said:“You don’t . . . you didn’t . . . have a wife, did you?”“No. I have never had a wife.”“Think of that now. . . . You’d have a house-keeper maybe?”“A married couple looked after me.”“Well, I never! Well, there’s never any knowing, is there?”He had learned by this time that there was nothing at all behind Mrs. Copas’s cryptic utterances. If there were anything she could arrive at it by circumlocution, and in her own good time would make it plain. Her next remark might have some connection with her previous train of thought or it might not. She said in a toneless, detached voice:“And to think of you turning up with our Matilda. And they do say how everything’s for the best. . . . It’s a pity business is so bad here, isn’t it?”Business was very bad. The faithful few of the district who always patronized Mr. Copas year after year attended, but they amounted to no more than fifty, while the young people were drawn off by the kinematograph. They even sank so far as to admit children free for three nights in the hope that their chatter would incite their parents to come and share the wonders they had seen. On the fourth night only four old women and a boy paid for admission.The situation was saved by a publican on the other side of the square who, envious of his rival’s successful enterprise with the kinematograph, hired the theater for a week’s boxing display, by his nephew, who was an ex-champion of the Midlands with a broken nose and reputation.That week was one of the most miserable depression. Mr. Copas drank freely. Mrs. Copas never stopped chatting, the company demanded their salaries up to date, accepted a compromise and disappeared, and the ex-champion of the Midlands took a fancy to Matilda. He followed her in the streets, sent her half-pounds of caramels, accosted her more than once and asked her if she did not want a new hat, and when she snubbed him demanded loudly to know what a pretty girl like her was doing without a lad. Chivalrously, not without a tremor, Mr. Mole offered himself as her escort in her walks abroad. They were invariably followed by the boxer whistling and shouting at intervals. Sometimes he would lag behind them and embark upon a long detailed and insulting description of Mr. Mole’s back view; sometimes he would hurry ahead, look round and leer and make unpleasant noises with his lips or contemptuous gestures with his hands.Matilda had found a certain spot by a canal where it passed out of the town and made a bee-line across the country. There was a bridge over a sluice which marked the cleavage between the sweet verdure of the fields and the soiled growth of the outskirts of the town. It was a lonely romantic spot and she wished to visit it again before they left. She explained to her friend that she wanted to be alone but dared not because of her pursuer, and her friend agreed to leave her on the bridge and to lurk within sight and earshot.They had to go by tram. The boxer was twenty yards behind them. They hurried on, mounted the tram just as it was starting, and congratulated themselves on having avoided him. When they reached the bridge there he was sitting on the parapet, whistling and leering. Matilda flamed scarlet and turned to go. Boiling with fury Old Mole hunched up his shoulders, tucked down his head (the attitude familiar to so many Thrigsbians), and bore down on the offender. He grunted out:“Be off.”“ ’Ave you bought the bally bridge?”And he grinned. The coarseness and beastliness of the creature revolted Mr. Mole, roused him to such a pitch of furious disgust, that he lost all sense of what he was doing, raised his stick, struck out, caught the fellow in the chest and sent him toppling over into the pool. He leaned over the parapet and watched the man floundering and splashing and gulping and spitting and cursing, saw his face turn greeny white with hard terror, but was entirely unmoved until he felt Matilda’s hand on his arm and heard her blubbering and crying:“He’s drowning! He’s drowning!”Then he rushed down and lay on his stomach on the bank and held out his stick, further, further, as far as he could reach, until the lout in the water clutched it. The boxer had lost his head. He tugged at the stick and it looked for a moment as though there would be two men in the water. It was a question which would first be exhausted.Grayer and grayer and more distorted grew the boxer’s face, redder and redder and more swollen Old Mole’s, until at last the strain relaxed and Matilda’s tormentor was drawn into shallow water and out on to the bank. There he lay drenched, hiccoughing, spitting, concerned entirely with his own discomfort and giving never a thought either to the object of his desires or his assailant and rescuer. At last he shook himself like a dog, squeezed the water out of his sleeves, sprang to his feet and was off like a dart along the towpath in the direction of the tall fuming chimneys of the town.Matilda and Old Mole walked slowly out toward the setting sun and in front of them for miles stretched the regiments of pollarded willows like mournful distorted human beings condemned forever to stand and watch over the still waters.“Life,” said Old Mole, “is full of astonishments. I should never have thought it of myself.”“He was very nearly drowned,” rejoined Matilda.“It is very singular,” said he, more to himself than to her, “that one’s instinct should think such a life worth saving. A more bestial face I never saw.”“I think,” said she, “you would help anybody whatever they were like.”She took his arm and they walked on, as it seemed, into the darkness. Until they turned, neither spoke. He said:“I am oddly miserable when I think that in a fortnightthe school will reopen and I shall not be there. I suppose it’s habit, but I want to go back and I know I never shall.”“I don’t want never to go back.”“Don’t you? But then you’re young and I’m rather old.”“I don’t think of you as old. I always think of you as some one very good and sometimes you make me laugh.”“Oh! Matilda, often, very often, you make me want to cry. And men don’t cry.”A little scornfully Matilda answered:“Don’tthey!”Through his mournfulness he felt a glow of happiness, a little aching in his heart, a sort of longing and a pleasant pride in this excursion with a young woman clinging to his arm and treating him with sweet consideration and tenderness.“After all,” he thought, “it is certainly true that when they reach middle age men do require an interest in some young life.”So, having fished out a theory, as he thought, to meet the case, he was quite content and prepared, untroubled, to enjoy his happiness.He did thoroughly enjoy his happiness. His newly awakened but unpracticed imagination worked like that of a sentimental and self-cloistered writer who, having no conception of human relationships, binds labels about the necks of his personages—Innocent Girlhood, Middle-aged Bachelorhood, Mother’s Love, Manly Honor, English Gentleman—and amuses himself and his readers with propping them up in the attitudes meet and right to their affixed characters. Except that he did not drag the Deity into it, Old Mole lived perfectly for a short space of time in a neatly rounded novelette, with himself as the touching, lamb-like hero and Matilda as the radiant heroine. He basked in it, and when on her he let loose a flood of what he thought to be emotion she only said:“Oh! Go on!”True to his sentimentality he was entirely unconscious of, absolutely unconcerned with, what she might be feeling. He only knew that he had been battered and bewildered and miserable and that now he was comfortable and at his ease.The appointed end of all such things, in print and out of it, is marriage. Outside marriage there is no such thing as affection between man and woman (in that atmosphere passion and desire do not exist and children are not born but just crop up). True to his fiction—and how many men are ever true to anything else?—Old Mole came in less than a week to the idea of marriage with Matilda. It was offensive to his common sense, so repugnant indeed that it almost shocked him back into the world of fact and that hideous mental and spiritual flux from which he was congratulating himself on having escaped. He held his nose and gulped it down and sighed:“Ah! Let us not look on the dark side of life!”Then he asked himself:“Do I love her? She has young dreams of love. How can I give her my love and not shatter them?”And much more in this egoistic strain he said, the disturbance in his heart, or whatever organ may be the seat of the affections, having totally upset his sense of humor. He told himself, of course, that she was hardly the wife for a man of his position, but that was only by way of peppering his emotions, and he was really rather amazed when he came to the further reflection that, after all, he had no position. To avoid the consternation it brought he decided to ask Matilda’s hand in marriage.As it turned out, to the utter devastation of his novelette, it was his hand that was asked.He bought Matilda a new camisole. He had heard the word used by women and was rather staggered when he found what it was he had purchased. Confusedly he presented it to Innocent Girlhood. She giggled and then, with a shout of laughter, rushed off to show Mrs. Copas her gift. He did not on that occasion stammer out his proposal.He took her for three walks and two tram-drives at fourpence each, but she was preoccupied and morose, and gave such vague answers to his preliminary remarks that his hopes died within him and he discussed the Insurance Act and Lancashire’s chances of defeating Yorkshire at Bradford. Moreover, Matilda was pale and drawn and not far from being downright ugly, far too plain for a noveletteat all events. He felt himself sliding backward and could hear the buzz and roar of the chaos within himself, and the novelette was unfinished and until he came to the last jaunting little hope in the future, the last pat on the back for the hero, the final distribution of sugar-plums all round, there would be no sort of security, no sealed circle wherein to dwell. He felt sick, and the nausea that came on him was worse than the fear and doubt through which he had passed. He was like a man after a long journey come hungry to an inn to find nothing to eat but lollipops.When they returned from their last tram-drive they had supper with Mr. and Mrs. Copas, who discussed the new actors whom they had engaged, as only two of the old company were willing to return. The new comic had acted in London, in the West End, had once made his twenty pounds a week. They were proud of him, and Mr. Copas unblushingly denounced the Drink as the undoing of many a nartist. Very early in the evening, before any move had been made to clear the plates and dishes away, Matilda declared herself tired, and withdrew. Mr. Copas went on talking and Mrs. Copas began to make horrible faces at him, so that Old Mole, in the vagueness of his acute discomfort, thought mistily that perhaps they were at the beginning of an altercation, which would end—as their altercations ended. However, the talk wenton and the grimaces went on until at last Mr. Copas perceived that he was the object of them, stopped dead, seized his hat and left the room. Mrs. Copas beamed on Mr. Mole. She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. They were bare to the elbow and fat and coarse and red. She went on beaming, and nervously he took out a cigar and lit it. Mrs. Copas leaned forward and with a knife began to draw patterns with the mustard left on the edge of a plate.“We’ll be on the move again soon, Mr. Mole.”“I shall be glad of that.”“What we want to know, what I want to know and what Mr. Copas wants to know is this. What are you going to do about it?”“I . . . I suppose I shall go with you.”“You know what I mean, Mr. Mole. Some folk ain’t particular. I am. And Mr. Copas is very careful about what happens in his theater. If it can’t be legitimate it can’t be and there’s nothing more to be said. . . . Now, Mr. Mole, what are you going to do?”“My good woman! I haven’t the least idea what you are talking about. I have enjoyed my stay with you. I have found it very instructive and profitable and I propose to——”“It’s Matilda, Mr. Mole. What’s done is done. We’re not saying anything about that. Some says it’s a curse and some says it’s the only thing worth living for. Matilda’s my own husband’s niece and I’ve got to see her properly done by whether you’reoffended with a little plain speaking or not, Mr. Mole.”She had now traced a very passable spider’s web in mustard on the plate.“If you need to be told, I must tell you, Mr. Mole. Matilda’s in the way.”No definite idea came to Mr. Mole, but a funny little throb and trickle began at the base of his spine. He dabbed his cigar down into half a glass of beer that Mr. Copas had left.“We’ve talked it out, Mr. Mole, and you’ve got to marry her or pay up handsome.”Marry! His first thought was in terms of the novelette, but those terms would not embrace Mrs. Copas or her present attitude. His first glimpse of the physical fact was through the chinks of his sentimental fiction, and he was angry and hurt and disgusted. Then, the fiction never having been rounded off, he was able to escape from it—(rare luck in this world of deceit)—and he shook himself free of its dust and tinsel, and, responding to the urgency of the occasion, saw or half-saw the circumstances from Matilda’s point of view. Mentally he swept Mrs. Copas aside. The thing lay between himself and the girl. Out of her presence he could not either think or feel about it clearly. Only for himself there lay here and now, before him, the opportunity for action, for real, direct, effective action, which would lift him out of his despond and bring his life into touch with another life. It gave him what he most needed, movement, uplift, theoccasion for spontaneity, for being rid, though it might be only temporarily, of his fear and doubt and sickness of mind. Healthily, or rather, in his eagerness for health, he refused to think of the consequences. He lit another cigar, steadying himself by a chair-back, so dazzled was he by the splendor of his resolution and the rush of mental energy that had brought him to it, and said:“Of course, if Matilda is willing, I will marry her.”“I didn’t expect it of you, being a gentleman,” returned Mrs. Copas, obliterating her spider’s web, “and, marriage being the lottery it is, there are worse ways of doing it than that. After all, you do know you’re not drawing an absolute blank, which, I know, happens to more than ever lets on.”Mr. Mole found that it is much easier to get married in life than in sentimental fiction. He never proposed to Matilda, never discussed the matter with her, only after the interview with Mrs. Copas she kissed him in the morning and in the evening, and as often in between as she felt inclined. He made arrangements with the registrar, bought a special license and a ring. He said: “I take you, Matilda Burn, to be my lawful wedded wife,” and she said: “I take you, Herbert Jocelyn Beenham, to be my lawful wedded husband.” Mrs. Copas sat on the registrar’s hat, and, without any other incident, they were made two in one and one in two.In view of the approaching change in his condition he had written to his lawyer and his banker in Thrigsby, giving orders to have all his personal property realized and placed on deposit, also for five hundred pounds to be placed on account for Mrs. H. J. Beenham.The day after his wedding came this letter from the Head Master:“MYDEARBEENHAM:—I am delighted that your whereabouts has been discovered. All search for you has been unavailing—one would not have thought it so easy for a man to disappear—and I had begun to be afraid that you had gone abroad. As I say, I am delighted, and I trust you are having a pleasant vacation. I owe you, I am afraid, a profound apology. If there be any excuse, it must be put down to the heat and the strain of the end of the scholastic year. I was thinking, I protest, only of the ancient foundation which you and I have for so long served. The Chairman of the Governors, always, as you know, your friend, has denounced what he is pleased to call my Puritanical cowardice. The Police have made inquiries about the young woman and state that she is a domestic servant who left her situation in distressing circumstances without her box and without a character. I do apologize most humbly, my dear Beenham, and I look to see you in your place at the commencement of the approaching term.”Old Mole read this letter three times, and the description of his wife stabbed him on each perusalmore deeply to the heart. He tore the sheet across and across and burned the pieces on the hearth. Matilda came in and found him at it: and when she spoke to him he gave no answer, but remained kneeling by the fender, turning the poker from one hand to the other.“Are you cross with me?” she said.“No. Not with you. Not with you. Not with you.”“You don’t often say things three times.”She came and laid her hands on his shoulders, and he took them and kissed them, for now he adored her.In the evening came a knock at the front door. Mr. Mole was at the theater arranging for a new play with which to reopen when the boxing season, which had been extended, was over. The slut of a landlady took no notice, and the knock was repeated thrice. Matilda went down and opened the door and found on the step a short, plump, rotund, elegant little man with spectacles and a huge mustache. He asked for Mr. Beenham, and she said she was Mrs. Beenham. He drew himself up and was very stiff and said at the back of his throat:“I am your husband’s brother.”She took him upstairs to their sitting-room, and he told her how distressed he was at the news that had reached him and to find his brother living in such a humble place. He added that it was a seriousblow to all his family, but that, for his part, the world being what it was and life on it being also what it was, he hoped that all might be for the best. Matilda let him have his say and tactfully led him on to talk about himself, and he told her all about his practice at the Chancery Bar, and the wine at his club, and his rooms in Gray’s Inn, and his collection of Battersea china, and his trouble with the committee of his golf club, and his dislike for most of his relations except his brother Herbert, who was the last man in the world, as he said, he had ever expected to go off the rails. She assured him then that Herbert was the best and kindest of men, and that it would not be her fault if their subsequent career did not astonish and delight him. She did not drop a single aitch, and, noticing carefully his London pronunciation, she mentally resolved to change her broad a’s and in future to call a schoolmaster a schoolmarster. . . . Their conversation came abruptly to an end, and she produced a pack of cards and taught him how to play German whist. From that he led her to double-dummy Bridge, and they were still at it when his brother returned. Matilda was scolded for being up so late, kissed, by both men, and packed off to bed.Whisky was produced. Said brother Robert:“Well, of all the lunatics!”“So you’ve been shocked and amazed and horrified. Do the others know?”“Not yet. . . . I thought I’d better see you first.”“All right. Tell them that I’m married and have become a rogue and a vagabond.”“You’re not going on with this?”“I am.”“Don’t be a fool. Your wife’s perfectly charming. There’s nothing against her.”“That’s had nothing to do with it. I’m going on for my own satisfaction. I’ve spent half my life in teaching. I want to spend the rest of it in learning.”“From play-actors? Oh! come!”“My dear Robert, life isn’t at all what you think it is. It isn’t what I thought it was. I’m interested. I’m eager. I’m keen. . . .”“And mad. . . .”“Maybe. But I tell you that life’s got a heart to it somewhere, and I’m going to find my way to it.”
When he came to himself he thought with a precision and clarity that amounted almost to vision of his first arrival at Oxford, saw himself eagerly,shyly, stepping down from the train and hurrying through the crowd of other young men, eager and shy, and meeting school acquaintances. He remembered with singular acuteness the pang of shame he had felt on encountering Blazering who was going to Magdalen while he himself was a scholar of Lincoln. He pursued the stripling who had been himself out of the station and up past the gaol, feeling amazingly, blissfully youthful when he put up his hand and found a stiff beard upon his chin. Gone was the vision of Oxford, gone the sensation of youth, and he realized that he was in bed in a stranger’s room, which, without his glasses, he could not see distinctly. There was a woman by his bedside, a stout woman, with a strong light behind her, so that he could not distinguish her features. It was a very little room, low in the ceiling. The smell of it was good. It had one small window, which was open, and through it there came up the hubbub of voices and the grinding beat and blare of a mechanical organ that repeated one tune so quickly that it seemed always to be afraid it would not have time to reach the end before it began again. The woman was knitting. He tried to remember who she might be, but failing, and feeling mortified at his failure, he consoled himself with the reflection that he was ill—ill-in-bed, one of the marked degrees of sickness among schoolboys. How ill? He had never been ill in his life.
“Can I have my spectacles?” he said.
“Oh!” The knitting in the woman’s hands wentclattering to the floor. “Lor’! Mr. Mole, you did give me a start. I shall have the palpitations, same as my mother. My mother had the palpitations for forty years and then she died of something else.”
“If I had my spectacles I could see who it is speaking.”
“It’s Mrs. Copas. Don’t you know me, Mr. Mole?”
“I—er. I . . . . This is your house?”
“It’s lodgings, Mr. Mole. You’ve been sick, Mr. Mole, you have. Prostrated on your back for nearly a week, Mr. Mole. You did give us all a turn, falling off the caravan like that into the King’s high road. You’d never believe the pool of blood you left in the road, Mr. Mole. But it soon dried up. . . .”
He began to have a glimmering, dimly to remember, a road, a caravan, a horse’s tail, dust, a droning voice behind him, but still the name of Copas meant nothing to him.
“Copas! Copas!” he said to himself, but aloud.
Mrs. Copas produced the spectacles and placed them on his nose. Then she leaned over him in his bed and in the loud indulgent voice with which the unafflicted humor the deaf, she said:
“Yes! Mrs. Copas. Matilda’s aunt.You know.”
That brought the whole adventure flooding back.
Matilda! The girl who wanted to speak properly, the girl whom he had found in the smelly little theater. No! Not in the theater! In the train! He writhed and went hot, and his head began tothrob, and he felt a strange want of coördination among the various parts of his body.
“I’m afraid,” he said, “I’m afraid Iamill.”
“There! There!” said Mrs. Copas. “We’ll soon pull you round. I’m used to the nursing; not that Mr. Copas is ever ill. He says a nartist can’t afford to be ill, but we had a comic once who used to have fits.”
“It’s very good of you. I must have been an incubus. I’m sure I must be taking you away from the theater.”
“We’ve got a new tune on the organ and we’re doing splendid business. Mr. Copaswillbe glad to hear you’ve asked for your spectacles. . . . Doctor says you mustn’t talk.”
And, indeed, he had lost all desire to do so. His head ached so that he could not keep his eyes open, nor think, nor hear anything but a confused buzz, and he sank back into the luxury of feeling sorry for himself.
Nothing broke in upon that sensation until suddenly the organ stopped. That startled him and set him listening. In the distance, muffled, he could hear the huge booming voice of Mr. Copas, but not what he said.
“Nice people,” he thought. “Nice kind people.”
There were three medicine bottles by his bed-side. They suddenly caught his eye and he gazed at them long and carefully. One was full and two were half empty. Their contents were brown, reddish, and white.
“I must be very ill,” he said to himself mournfully. There darted in on him a feeling of fun. “No one knows! I am ill and no one knows. Not a soul knows. They won’t know. They won’t ever know.”
That seemed to settle it. “They” sank away. He hurled defiance after them, opened, as it were, a trap-door in the past, and gloated over the sight of “them” hurtling down and down. He felt better after that. The pain in his head was almost gone. His bed seemed to be floating, drifting, turning on the tide, while it was moored to Mrs. Copas. He gazed at her and saw in her the comfortable, easy, hovering present. He had only to cut the painter to drift out into the wide future. When he opened his mouth to tell Mrs. Copas that he remembered her perfectly she laid her finger on her lips and said “Ssh!” and when he insisted on grunting out a word, she smacked the back of her fat hand roguishly and cried:
“Naughty!”
At that he giggled helplessly and went on giggling until he was near crying.
“Histrionics!” said Mrs. Copas, and gave him brandy.
Matilda appeared at the door and was pushed out. At that Mr. Mole, who had seen her, began to weep and sobbed like a disappointed child, and went on sobbing until Matilda was allowed to come in and sit by his side. She sat on the bed, and he stopped his sobbing as abruptly as a horse willcome to a standstill after a mad sunset gallop. Mrs. Copas left them.
Matilda sat stroking her cheek and gazing at him. She cocked her head on one side and said:
“Glad you’re better, but I don’t like men with beards. Napoleon didn’t have a beard.”
“How do you know?”
“I bought a book about him for a penny. I like Josephine.”
“I don’t know much about it, but I always felt sorry for her.”
“She gave as good as she got. That’s why I like her. . . . I had a part to do to-night.”
“A long part?”
“No. I just had to say to uncle, ‘Won’t you give her another chance?’ His erring wife had just returned to him.”
“Did you do it well?”
“No. Uncle said no one who wasn’t at the back of the stage could hear me.”
“Oh! Did you like it?”
“Yes. I felt funny like.”
Mr. Mole coughed. Matilda stopped.
“What did I say?”
“Funny like.”
“Don’t people say that?”
“It is unusual.”
“Oh!”
“I wasn’t a bit nervous. Uncle says that’s a bad sign. He says I looked all right, though I’m sure I was an object with that paint stuff on my face andthe red all in the wrong place. Aunt wouldn’t let me do it myself. . . . You will cut your beard off?”
“I don’t know. I might like it.”
She handed him a mirror, and mischief danced in her eyes as she watched his disconcerted expression. “Bit of a surprise, eh?”
He could find nothing to say. Impossible for him to lay the mirror down. For years he had accepted a certain idea of his personal appearance—ruddy, heavy-jowled, with a twinkle behind spectacles surmounted by a passably high forehead that was furrowed by the lines of a frown almost deliberately cultivated for the purposes of inspiring terror in small boys delinquent. Now, in the sharpened receptivity of his issue from unconsciousness, his impression was one of roundness, round face, round eyes, round brow, round head (balder than he had thought)—all accentuated by the novelty of his beard, that was gray, almost white. Age and roundness. Fearful of meeting Matilda’s gaze, he went on staring into the mirror. Her youth, the fun bubbling up in her, reproached him, made him feel defenceless against her, and, though he delighted in her presence, he was resentful. She had so many precious qualities to which he could not respond.
“I ’spect I must go now,” she said.
“Yes. I’m rather tired.”
She took the mirror from him, patted his hand, and soothed him, saying:
“You’ll soon be up and doing, and then you’ll begin to teach me, won’t you?”
“How would it be if you came and read to me every evening before the play? Then we could begin at once.”
“Shall I?” She warmed to the plan. “What shall I read?”
“You might read your book about Napoleon.”
“Oh! Lovely!”
Mrs. Copas returned to give him his medicine and to tuck him up for the night.
“What day is it?” he asked.
“Saturday.”
“Are there any letters for me?” He remembered then that there could be none, that he was no longer his old self, that an explosion in his affairs had hurled him out of his old habitual existence and left him bruised and broken among strangers.
“I would like,” he said, “to shave to-morrow.”
“Yes, yes,” replied Mrs. Copas, humoring him. “I’m in the next room if you want anything. Doctor said you was to have as much sleep as you could get. Being Saturday night, and you an invalid, Mr. Copas bought you some grapes and sponge-cake, and he wants to know if you’d like some port wine. We thought it ’ud make you sleep.”
He expressed a desire for port, and she bustled into the next room and came back with a tumblerful. He was, or fancied he was, something of a connoisseur, and he propped himself up and sippedthe dark liquid, and, as he was wont, rolled it round his tongue. It tasted of ink and pepper. He wanted to spit it out, but, blinking up at Mrs. Copas, he saw the good creature beaming at him in rapt indulgence, and could not bring himself to offend her. With his gorge rising he sipped down about a third of the tumbler’s contents and then feebly, miserably held it out toward her.
“A bit strong for you?”
He nodded, drew the bed-clothes up over his shoulders and feigned sleep. The light was put out and he heard Mrs. Copas creep into the next room. Sleep? The fiery liquor sent the blood racing and throbbing through his veins. The palms of his hands were dry and hot, and his head seemed to be bulging out of its skin. His ears were alert to every sound, and to every sound his nerves responded with a thrill. He could hear footsteps on the cobbles of the street outside, voices, hiccoughs, a woman’s voice singing. These were the accompaniment to nearer sounds, a duet in the next room, a deep bass muttering, and a shrill argumentative treble. The bass swelled into anger. The treble roared into pleading. The bass became a roar, the treble a squeak. It was exciting, exasperating. In his bed Beenham tossed from side to side. He did not want to listen to their altercation, but sleep would not come to him. The bass voice broke into a crackling; then spluttering, furious sounds came. The treble squealed pitifully. Came the thud and smack of a fist on flesh and bone, a gasp, a whine,a whimper, another thud and smack, and growls from the bass, then silence. . . .
Sick at heart Old Mole lay in his bed staring, staring into the darkness, and the blood in him boiled and bubbled, and his skin was taut and he shivered. He had heard of men beating their wives, but as one hears of the habits of wild animals in African forests; he had thought of it as securely as here in England one may think of a man-eating tiger near an Indian village. Now, here, in the next room, the thing had happened. Manliness, that virtue which at school had been held up as the highest good, bade him arise and defend the woman. In theory manliness had always had things perfectly its own way. In practice, now, sound sense leaped ahead of virtue, counted the cost and accurately gauged the necessity of action. In the first place to defend Mrs. Copas would mean an intrusion into the sanctuary of human life, the conjugal chamber; in the second place, in spite of many familiar pictures of St. George of Cappadocia (subsequently of England), it would be embarrassing to defend Mrs. Copas in her night attire; in the third place, the assault had grown out of their altercation of which he had heard nothing whatever; and, lastly, it might be a habit with Mr. and Mrs. Copas to smite and be smitten. Therefore Old Mole remained in his bed, faintly regretting the failure of manliness, fighting down his emotion of disgust, and endeavoring to avoid having to face his position. In vain: shunning all further thoughtof the miserable couple in the next room, he was driven back upon himself, to his wretched wondering:
“What have I done?”
He had thrown up his very pleasant life in Thrigsby and Bigley, a life, after all, of some consequence, for what? . . . For the society of a disreputable strolling player who was blind with conceit, was apt to get drunk on Saturday nights, and in that condition violently to assault the wife of his bosom. And he had entered into this adventure with enthusiasm, had seen their life as romantic and adventurous, deliberately closing his eyes to the brutality and squalor of it. Thud, whack! and there were the raw facts staring him in the face.
There came a little moaning from the next room: never a sound from the bass: and soon all was still, save for the mice in the skirting board and occasional footsteps on the cobbles of the street outside.
No sleep came to Old Mole until the pale light of dawn crept into his room to show him, shivering, its meanness and poverty. It sickened him, but when in reaction he came to consider his old mode of living that seemed so paltry as to give a sort of savor to the coarseness of this. . . . Anyhow, he reflected, he was tied to his bed, could not take any action, and must wait upon circumstance, and hope only that there might not be too many violent shocks in store for him.
Mrs. Copas bore the marks of her husband’s attentions:a long bruise over her right eye and down to the cheek-bone, and a cut on her upper lip which had swelled into an unsightly protuberance. Her spirit seemed to be entirely unaffected, and she beamed upon him from behind her temporary deformities. When she asked him if he had slept well, he lied and said he had slept like a top.
She brought him hot water, razor, brush and soap, and he shaved. Off came his beard, and, after long scrutiny of his appearance in the mirror and timid hesitation, he removed the moustache which had been his pride and anxiety during his second year at Oxford, since when it had been his constant and unobtrusive companion. The effect was startling. His upper lip was long and had, if the faces of great men be any guide, the promise of eloquence. There was a new expression in his face, of boldness, of firmness, of—as he phrased it himself—benevolent obstinacy. His changed countenance gave him so much pleasure that he spent the morning gazing into the mirror at different angles. With such a brow, such an upper lip, such lines about the nose and chin, it seemed absurd that he should have spent twenty-five years as an assistant master in a secondary school. Then he laughed at himself as he realized that he was behaving as he had not done since the ambitious days at Oxford when he had endeavored to decide on a career. Ruefully he remembered that in point of fact he had not decided. With a second in Greats he had taken the first appointment that turned up. His historyhad been the history of thousands. One thing only he had escaped—marriage, the ordinary timid, matter-of-fact, sugar-coated marriage upon means that might or might not prove sufficient. After that, visiting his friends’ houses, he had sighed sentimentally, but, with all the eligible women of his acquaintance—and they were not a few—he had been unable to avoid a quizzical tone which forbade the encouragement of those undercurrents upon which, he had observed, middle-aged men were swept painlessly into matrimony. . . . Pondering his clean-shaven face in the mirror he felt oddly youthful and excited.
In the evening Matilda came as she had promised, with the book, which proved to be that Life of Napoleon by Walter Scott which so incensed Heine. The sun shone in at the window upon the girl’s brown hair, and as she opened the book the church bells began to ring with such an insistent buzzing that it was impossible for her to read. As he lay in bed Old Mole thought of Heine lying in his mattress-grave, being visited by hisMouche,just such another charming creature as this, young and ardent, and by her very presence soothing; only he was no poet, but a man dulled by years of unquestioning service. He gazed at Matilda as he could not recollect ever having gazed at a woman, critically, but with warm interest. There was a kind of bloom on her, the fragrance and graciousness that, when he had encountered it as a young man, had produced in him a delicious blurring of the senses,an almost intoxication wherein dreadfully he had lost sight of the individual in the possession of them, and considered her only as woman. Now his subjection to the spell only heightened his sense of Matilda’s individuality and sharpened his curiosity about her. Also it stripped him of his preoccupation with himself and his own future, and he fell to considering hers and wondering what the world might hold for her. . . . Like most men he had his little stock of generalizations about women, how they were mysterious, capricious, cruel, unintelligent, uncivilized, match-making, tactless, untruthful, etc., but to Matilda he could not apply them. He wanted to know exactly how she personally felt, thought, saw, moved, lived, and he refused to make any assumption about her. This curiosity of his was not altogether intellectual: it was largely physical, and it grew. He was annoyed that he had not seen her come into the room to mark how she walked, and to procure this satisfaction he asked her to give him a glass of water. He watched her. She walked easily with, for a woman, a long stride and only a very slight swing of the hips, and a drag of the arms that pleased him mightily. As she gave him the glass of water she said:
“You do look nice. I knew you would, without that moustache.”
She had a strong but pleasant North-Country accent, and in her voice there was a faint huskiness that he found very moving, though it was only later, when he analyzed the little thrills which dartedabout him in all his conversations with her, that he set it down to her voice. . . . She resumed her seat by the foot of his bed with her book in her hand, and his physical curiosity waxed only the greater from the satisfaction he had given it. He could find no excuse for more, and when the bells ceased he took refuge in talk.
“Where were you born, Matilda?”
“In a back street,” she said. “Father was a fitter, and mother was a dressmaker, but she died, and father got the rheumatism, so as we all ’ad—had—to work. There was——”
“Were.” She blushed and looked very cross.
“Were three girls and two boys. Jim has gone to Canada, and George is on the railway, and both my sisters are married, one in the country, and one in Yorkshire. I’m the youngest.”
“Did you go to school?”
“Oh! yes. Jackson Street, but I left when I was fourteen to go into a shop. That was sitting still all day and stitching, or standing all day behind a counter with women coming in and getting narked——”
“Getting what?”
“Narked—cross-like.”
“I see. So you didn’t care about that?”
“No. There is something in me here”—she laid her hand on her bosom—“that goes hot and hard when I’m not treated fair, and then I don’t care a brass farthing what ’appens.”
She was too excited as she thought of her oldwrongs to correct the last dropped aitch, though she realized it and bit her lip.
“I been in service three years now, and I’ve been in four places. I’ve had enough.”
“And what now?”
“I shall stop ’ere as long as you do.”
Something in her tone, a greater huskiness, perhaps, surprised him, and he looked up at her and met her eyes full. He was confused and amazed and startled, and his heart grew big within him, but he could not turn away. In her expression there was a mingling of fierce strength, defiance, and that helplessness which had originally overcome him and led to his undoing. He was frightened, but deliciously, so that he liked it.
“I didn’t know,” she said, “that uncle drank. Father drank, too. There was a lot in our street that did. I’m not frightened of many things, but I am of that.”
He resented the topic on her lips and, by way of changing the subject, suggested that she should read. She turned to her book and read aloud the first five pages in a queer, strained, high-pitched voice that he knew for a product of the Board School, where every variance of the process called education is a kind of stiff drill. When she came to the end of a paragraph he took the book and read to her, and she listened raptly, for his diction was good. After he had come to the end of the first chapter she asked for the book again and produced a rather mincing but wonderfully accurate copy of his manner.She did not wait for his comment but banged the book shut, threw it on the bed, and said:
“That’s better. I knew I could do it. I knew I was clever. . . . You’ll stop ’ere for a bit when you’re better. You mustn’t mind uncle. I’ll be awfully nice to you, I will. I’ll be a servant to you and make you comfortable, and I won’t ask for no wages. . . .”
“My dear child,” replied Old Mole, “you can’t possibly have enjoyed it more than I.”
She was eager on that.
“Did you really, really like it?”
“I did really.”
So began the education of Matilda. At first he drew up, for his own use, a sort of curriculum—arithmetic, algebra, geography, history, literature, grammar, orthography—and a time-table, two hours a day for six days in the week, but he very soon found that she absolutely refused to learn anything that did not interest her, and that he had to adapt his time to hers. Sometimes she would come to him for twenty minutes; sometimes she would devote the whole afternoon to him. When they had galloped through Oman’s “History of England” she declined to continue that study, and after one lesson in geography she burned the primer he had sent her out to buy. When he asked her where Ipswich was she turned it over in her mind, decided that it had a foreign sound and plumpedfor Germany. She did not seem to mind in the least when he told her it was in England, in the Eastern Counties. . . . On the other hand, when he procured their itinerary for the next few months from Mr. Copas and marked it out on the map for her, she was keenly interested and he seized on the occasion to point out Ipswich and, having engaged her attention, all the county towns of England and Scotland.
“Where were you born?” she asked.
He found the village in Lincolnshire.
“And did you go to a boarding-school?”
He pointed to Haileybury and then to Oxford. From there he took her down the river to London, and told her how it was the capital of the greatest Empire the world had ever seen, and how the Mother of Parliaments sat by the river and made decrees for half the world, and how the King lived in an ugly palace within sight of the Mother of Parliaments, and how it was the greatest of ports, and how in Westminster Abbey all the noblest of men lay buried. She was not interested and asked:
“Where’s the Crystal Palace, where they play the Cup-tie?”
He did not know where in London, or out of it, the Crystal Palace might be, and she was delighted to find a gap in his knowledge. On the whole she took her lessons very seriously, and he found that he could get her to apply herself to almost any subject if he promised that at the end of it she shouldbe allowed to read. . . . Teaching under these circumstances he found more difficult than ever he had imagined it could be. In his Form-room by the glass roof of the gymnasium he had been backed by tradition, the ground had been prepared for him in the lower Forms; there was the whole complicated machinery of the school to give him weight and authority. Further, the subjects of instruction were settled for him by the Oxford and Cambridge Examination Board. Now he was somewhat nettled to find that, though he might draw up and amend curricula, he was more and more forced to take the nature and extent of his teaching from his pupil, who, having no precise object in view, followed only her instinct, and that seemed to bid her not so much to lay up stores of knowledge as to disencumber herself, to throw out ballast, everything that impeded the buoyancy of her nature.
They were very pleasant hours for both of them, and in her company he learned to give as little thought to the future as she. At first, after he recovered, he fidgeted because there were no letters. Day after day passed and brought him no communication from the outside world. Being a member of many committees and boards, he was used to a voluminous if uninteresting post. However, he got used to their absence, and what with work in the theater and teaching Matilda he had little time for regret or anxiety. He had been up from his bed a whole week before he bought a newspaper, that which he had been in the habit ofreading in his morning train. It was dull and only one announcement engaged his attention; the advertisement of the school setting forth the fees and the opening date of the next term—September 19. That gave him four weeks in which freely to enjoy his present company. Thereafter surely there would be investigation, inquiry for him, the scandal would reach his relatives and they would—would they not?—cause a search for him. Till then he might be presumed to be holiday-making.
Meanwhile he had grown used to Mr. Copas’s manner of living—the dirt, the untidiness, the coarse food, the long listlessness of the day, the excitement and feverishness of the evening. Mrs. Copas’s disfigurements were long in healing, and when he was well enough he replaced her at the door and took the money, and sold the grimy-thumbed tickets for the front seats. He sat through every performance and became acquainted with every item in Mr. Copas’s repertory. With that remarkable person he composed a version of “Iphigenia,” for from his first sketch of the play Mr. Copas had had his eye on Agamemnon as a part worthy of his powers. Mr. Mole insisted that Matilda should play the part of Iphigenia, and Mrs. Copas was given Clytemnestra wherewith to do her worst. . . . The only portion of the piece that was written was Iphigenia’s share of her scenes with Agamemnon. These Old Mole wrote out in as good prose as he could muster, and she learned them by heart. Unfortunately they were too long for Mr. Copas, andwhen it came to performance—there were only two rehearsals—he burst into them with his gigantic voice and hailed tirades at his audience about the bitterness of ingratitude in a fair and favorite daughter, trounced Clytemnestra for the lamentable upbringing she had given their child, and, in the end, deprived Iphigenia of the luxury of slaughter by falling on his sword and crying:
“Thus like a Roman and a most unhappy father I die of thrice and doubly damned, self-inflicted wounds. By my example let all men, especially my daughter, know there is a canon fixed against self-slaughter.”
He made nonsense of the whole thing, but it was wonderfully effective. So far as it was at all lucid the play seemed to represent Agamemnon as a wretched man driven to a miserable end by a shrewish wife and daughter.
Much the same fate attended Mr. Mole’s other contribution to the repertory, a Napoleonic drama in which Mr. Copas figured—immensely to his own satisfaction—as the Corsican torn between an elderly and stout Marie Louise and a youthful and declamatory Josephine. Through five acts Mr. Copas raged and stormed up and down the Emperor’s career, had scenes with Josephine and Marie Louise when he felt like it, confided his troubles and ambitions to Murat when he wanted a rest from his ranting, sacked countries, cities, ports as easily and neatly as you or I might pocket the red at billiards, made ponderous love to the golden-hairedlady of the Court, introduced comic scenes with the lugubrious young man, wept over the child, dressed up as L’Aiglon, whom he called “Little Boney,” banished Josephine from the Court, and died on the battlefield of Waterloo yielding up his sword to the Duke of Wellington, represented by Mr. Mole, his first appearance upon any stage, with this farewell:
“My last word to England is—be good to Josephine.”
It was the Theater Royal’s most successful piece. The inhabitants of that little Staffordshire town had heard of the Duke of Wellington and they applauded him to the echo. Every night when they played that stirring drama, after Mr. Copas had taken his fill of the applause, there were calls for the Duke, and Mr. Mole would appear leading Josephine by the hand.
At the top of their success Mr. Copas decided to move on.
“In this business,” he said, “you have to know when to go. You have to leave ’em ripe for the next visit, and go away and squeeze another orange. I said to Mrs. Copas, the night you came, that you looked like luck. You’ve done it. If you’ll stay, sir, I’ll give you a pound a week. You’re a nartist, you are. That Wellington bit of yours without a word to say—d’you know what we call that? We call that ’olding the stage. It takes a nartist to do that.”
Mr. Mole took this praise with becoming modestyand said that he would stay, for the present. Then he added:
“And about Matilda?”
“She’s my own niece,” replied Mr. Copas, “but I don’t mind telling you that she’s not a bit o’ good. She ain’t got the voice. She ain’t got the fizzikew. When there’s a bit o’ real acting to be done, she isn’t there. She just isn’t there. There’s a hole where she ought to be. I’m bothered about that girl, I am, bothered. She doesn’t earn her keep.”
“I thought she was very charming.”
“Pretty and all that, but that’s not acting. Set her against Mrs. Copas and where is she?”
Mr. Mole’s own private opinion was that on the stage Mrs. Copas was repulsive. However, he kept that to himself. Very quietly he said:
“If Matilda goes, I go.”
Mr. Copas looked very mysterious and winked at him vigorously. Then he grinned and held out a dirty hand.
“Put it there, my boy, put it there. What’s yours?”
Within half an hour he had coaxed another ten pounds out of Mr. Mole’s pocket and Matilda’s tenure of the part of Josephine was guaranteed.
At their next stopping-place, on the outskirts of the Pottery towns, disaster awaited the company. A wheel of the caravan jammed as they were going down a hill and delayed them for some hours, sothat they arrived too late in the evening to give a performance. Mr. Copas insisted that the theater should be erected, and lashed his assistants with bitter and blasphemous words, so that they became excited and flurried and made a sad muddle of their work. When at last it was finished and Mr. Copas went out himself to post up his bills on the walls of the neighborhood, where of all places he regarded his fame as most secure, he had got no farther than the corner of the square when he came on a gleaming white building that looked as though it were made of icing sugar, glittering and dazzling with electric light and plastered all over with lurid pictures of detectives and criminals and passionate men and women in the throes of amorous catastrophes and dilemmas. He stopped outside this place and stared it up and down, gave it his most devastating fore-and-aft look, and uttered one word:
“Blast!”
Then unsteadily he made for the door of the public-house adjoining it and called for the landlord, whom he had known twenty years and more. From the platform of the theater Mrs. Copas saw him go in, and she rushed to find Mr. Mole, and implored him to deliver her husband from the seven devils who would assuredly possess him unless he were speedily rescued and sent a-billposting.
Mr. Mole obeyed, and found the actor storming at the publican, asking him how he dare take the bread from the belly and the air from the nostrils of a nartist with a lot o’ dancing dotty pictures.With difficulty Mr. Copas was soothed and placated. He had ordered a glass of beer in order to give himself a status in the house, and the publican would not let him pay for it. Whereupon he spilled it on the sanded floor and stalked out. Mr. Mole followed him and found him brooding over a poster outside the “kinema” which represented a lady in the act of saving her child from a burning hotel. He seized his paste-pot, took out a bill from his satchel, and covered the heads of the lady and her child with the announcement of his own arrival with new plays and a brilliant and distinguished company.
When he was safely round the corner he seized his companion by the arm and said excitedly:
“Ruining the country they are with them things. Last time I pitched opposite one o’ them, when they ought to have been working my own company was in there watching the pictures.”
“I have always understood,” replied Mr. Mole, “that they have a considerable educational value, and certainly it seems to me that through them the people can come by a more accurate knowledge of the countries and customs of the world than by reading or verbal instruction.”
Mr. Copas snorted:
“Have youseen’em?”
“No.”
“Then talk when you have. I say it’s ruining the country and pampering the public. Who wants to know about the countries and customs of the world?What men and women want to know is the workings of the human heart.”
Unexpectedly Mr. Mole found himself reduced to triteness. The only comment that presented itself to his mind was that the human heart was a mystery beyond knowing, but that did not allow him to controvert the actor’s dictum that no one wanted to know about the countries and customs of the world, and he wondered whether the kinematograph did, in fact, convey a more accurate impression of the wonders of the world than Hakluyt or Sir John Mandeville, who did, at any rate, present the results of their travels and inventions with that pride in both truth and lying which begets style.
He determined to visit the kinematograph, and after he and Mr. Copas had completed their round and made it possible for a large number of the inhabitants of the Potteries to become aware of their existence, he returned to the Theater Royal and fetched Matilda. They paid threepence each and sat in the best seats in the middle of the hall, where they were regaled with a Wild West melodrama, an adventure of Max Linder, a Shakespearean production by a famous London actor, a French drama of love and money, and a picture of bees making honey in their hive. Matilda liked the bees and the horses in the Wild West melodrama. When Max Linder climbed into a piano and the hammers hit him on the nose and eyes she laughed; but she said the French drama was silly, and as for the Shakespearean production she said:
“You can’t follow the play, but I suppose it’s good for you.”
“How do you mean—good for you?”
“I mean you don’t really like it, but there’s a lot of it, and a lot of people, and the dresses are lovely. It doesn’t get hold of you like uncle does sometimes.”
“Your uncle says the kinemas are ruining the country.”
“Oh! He only means they’re making business bad for him.”
“Your uncle says you’ll never make an actress, Matilda.”
“Does he?”
(Some one behind them said “Ssh!”
“Ssh yourself,” retorted Matilda. “There ain’t nothing to hear.”)
“Does he?” she said. “What doyouthink?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know much about it.”
For the first time he noted that when he was with Matilda his brain worked in an entirely novel fashion. It was no longer cool and fastidiously analytical, seizing on things and phenomena from the outside, but strangely excited and heated, athletic and full of energy and almost rapturously curious about the inside of things and their relation one with another. For instance, he had hitherto regarded the kinematograph as a sort of disease that had broken out all over the face of the world, but now his newly working mind, his imagination—that was the word for it—saw it as human effort, as a thing controlledby human wills to meet human demands. It did not satisfy his own demand, nor apparently did it satisfy Matilda’s. For the rest of the audience he would not venture to decide. Indeed he gave little thought to them, for he was entirely absorbed by the wonder of the miracle that had come to him, the new vision of life, the novel faculty of apprehension. He was in a state of ferment and could not sort his impressions and ideas, but he was quite marvelously interested in himself, and, casting about for expression of it all, he remembered stories of seeds buried for years under mighty buildings in cities and how when the buildings were pulled down those seeds put forth with new vigor and came to flower. So (he said to himself) it had been with him. Excitedly he turned to Matilda and said:
“About this acting. Do you yourself think you can do it?”
“I’m sure I can.”
“Then you shall.”
The lights in the hall went up to indicate the end of the cycle of pictures.
All that night and through the next day his exaltation continued, and then suddenly it vanished, leaving him racked by monstrous doubts. His mind, the full exercise of which had given him such thrilling delight, seemed to become parched and shriveled as a dried pea. Where had been heldout for him the promise of fine action was now darkness, and he sank deeper and deeper into a muddy inertia. Fear possessed him and brought him to agony, dug into his sides with its spur, drove him floundering on, and when out of the depths of his soul he strove to squeeze something of that soaring energy that had visited him or been struck out of him (he knew not which it was) he could summon nothing more powerful to his aid than anger. He wept tears of anger—anger at the world, at himself, and the blind, aimless force of events, at his own impotence to move out of the bog, at the folly and obstinacy which had led him to submit to the affront that had been put upon him by men who for years had been his colleagues and comrades. His anger was blown to a white heat by disgust when he looked back and counted the years he had spent in fatted security mechanically plying a mechanical profession, shut out by habit and custom from both imaginative power and the impotence of exhaustion. He raged and stormed and blubbered, and he marveled at the commotion going on within him as he pursued his daily tasks, read aloud with Matilda, argued with Mr. Copas, took money at the door of the theater in the evening, sat among the dirty, smelling, loutish audience. In his bitterness he found a sort of comfort in reverting to his old bantering attitude toward women, to find it a thousand times intensified. More than half the audience were women, poor women, meanly dressed, miserably corseted; the fat women bulgedand heaved out of their corsets, and the thin women looked as though they had been dropped into theirs and were only held up by their armpits. There they sat, hunched and bunched, staring, gaping, giggling, moping, chattering, chattering . . . Ach! They were silly.
And the men? God save us! these sodden, stupid clods were men. They slouched and sprawled and yawned and spat. Their hands were dirty, their teeth yellow, and their speech was thick, clipped, guttural, inhuman. . . . Driven on by a merciless logic he was forced into consideration of himself. As he sat there at the end of the front row he turned his hands over and over; fat, stumpy hands they were, and he put them up and felt the fleshiness of his neck, the bushy hair growing out of his ears, and he ran them along his plump legs and prodded the stoutness of his belly. He laughed at himself. He laughed at the whole lot of them. And he tried to remember a single man or a single woman whom he had encountered in his life and could think of as beautiful. Not one.
He turned his attention to the stage. Copas was almost a dwarf, a strutting, conceited little dwarf, pouring out revolting nonsense, a hideous caricature of human beings who were the caricatures of creation. He said to himself:
“I must get out of this.”
And he found himself using a phrase he had employed for years in dealing with small boys whoproduced slovenly work and wept when he railed at them:
“Tut! Tut! This will never do!”
At that he gasped. He was using the phrase to himself! He was therefore like a small boy in the presence of outraged authority, and that authority was (words came rushing in on him) his own conscience, his own essence, liberated, demanding, here and now, among men and women as they are, the very fullness of life.
He had not regained his mood of delight, but rather had reached the limit of despair, had ceased blindly and uselessly to struggle, but cunningly, cautiously began to urge his way out of his despond. Whatever happened, he must move forward. Whatever happened, he must know, discover, reach out and grasp.
And he blessed the illumination that had come to him, blessed also the blackness and misery into which, incontinently, he had fallen. He submitted to exhaustion and was content to await an accretion of energy.
Thereafter, for a little while, he found himself more akin to Mr. Copas, drank with him, cracked jokes with him, walked with him and listened to his talk. He began to appreciate Mrs. Copas and to understand that being beaten by a man is not incompatible with a genuine affection and sympathy for him. He speculated not at all, and more than ever his instruction of Matilda became dependent upon her caprice.
Her uncle now gave her a salary of five shillings a week and upon her first payment she went out and bought a cigar for her mentor. She gave three half-pence for it and he smoked it and she wore the band on her little finger. To guard against such presents in the future he bought himself a box of fifty Manilas.
Mrs. Copas began to sound him as to his resources. Losing patience with his evasions she asked him at last bluntly if he were rich. He turned his cigar round his tongue and said:
“It depends what you mean by rich.”
“Well,” she replied cautiously, feeling her ground, “could you lay your hands on fifty pounds without selling anything?”
“Certainly I could, or a hundred.”
“A hundred pounds!”
Her eyes and mouth made three round O’s and she was silenced.
Both were astonished and both sat, rather awkwardly, adjusting their financial standards. She took up her knitting and he plied his cigar. They were sitting on boxes outside the stage door in the warm August sunlight. She gave a discreet little cough and said:
“You don’t . . . you didn’t . . . have a wife, did you?”
“No. I have never had a wife.”
“Think of that now. . . . You’d have a house-keeper maybe?”
“A married couple looked after me.”
“Well, I never! Well, there’s never any knowing, is there?”
He had learned by this time that there was nothing at all behind Mrs. Copas’s cryptic utterances. If there were anything she could arrive at it by circumlocution, and in her own good time would make it plain. Her next remark might have some connection with her previous train of thought or it might not. She said in a toneless, detached voice:
“And to think of you turning up with our Matilda. And they do say how everything’s for the best. . . . It’s a pity business is so bad here, isn’t it?”
Business was very bad. The faithful few of the district who always patronized Mr. Copas year after year attended, but they amounted to no more than fifty, while the young people were drawn off by the kinematograph. They even sank so far as to admit children free for three nights in the hope that their chatter would incite their parents to come and share the wonders they had seen. On the fourth night only four old women and a boy paid for admission.
The situation was saved by a publican on the other side of the square who, envious of his rival’s successful enterprise with the kinematograph, hired the theater for a week’s boxing display, by his nephew, who was an ex-champion of the Midlands with a broken nose and reputation.
That week was one of the most miserable depression. Mr. Copas drank freely. Mrs. Copas never stopped chatting, the company demanded their salaries up to date, accepted a compromise and disappeared, and the ex-champion of the Midlands took a fancy to Matilda. He followed her in the streets, sent her half-pounds of caramels, accosted her more than once and asked her if she did not want a new hat, and when she snubbed him demanded loudly to know what a pretty girl like her was doing without a lad. Chivalrously, not without a tremor, Mr. Mole offered himself as her escort in her walks abroad. They were invariably followed by the boxer whistling and shouting at intervals. Sometimes he would lag behind them and embark upon a long detailed and insulting description of Mr. Mole’s back view; sometimes he would hurry ahead, look round and leer and make unpleasant noises with his lips or contemptuous gestures with his hands.
Matilda had found a certain spot by a canal where it passed out of the town and made a bee-line across the country. There was a bridge over a sluice which marked the cleavage between the sweet verdure of the fields and the soiled growth of the outskirts of the town. It was a lonely romantic spot and she wished to visit it again before they left. She explained to her friend that she wanted to be alone but dared not because of her pursuer, and her friend agreed to leave her on the bridge and to lurk within sight and earshot.
They had to go by tram. The boxer was twenty yards behind them. They hurried on, mounted the tram just as it was starting, and congratulated themselves on having avoided him. When they reached the bridge there he was sitting on the parapet, whistling and leering. Matilda flamed scarlet and turned to go. Boiling with fury Old Mole hunched up his shoulders, tucked down his head (the attitude familiar to so many Thrigsbians), and bore down on the offender. He grunted out:
“Be off.”
“ ’Ave you bought the bally bridge?”
And he grinned. The coarseness and beastliness of the creature revolted Mr. Mole, roused him to such a pitch of furious disgust, that he lost all sense of what he was doing, raised his stick, struck out, caught the fellow in the chest and sent him toppling over into the pool. He leaned over the parapet and watched the man floundering and splashing and gulping and spitting and cursing, saw his face turn greeny white with hard terror, but was entirely unmoved until he felt Matilda’s hand on his arm and heard her blubbering and crying:
“He’s drowning! He’s drowning!”
Then he rushed down and lay on his stomach on the bank and held out his stick, further, further, as far as he could reach, until the lout in the water clutched it. The boxer had lost his head. He tugged at the stick and it looked for a moment as though there would be two men in the water. It was a question which would first be exhausted.Grayer and grayer and more distorted grew the boxer’s face, redder and redder and more swollen Old Mole’s, until at last the strain relaxed and Matilda’s tormentor was drawn into shallow water and out on to the bank. There he lay drenched, hiccoughing, spitting, concerned entirely with his own discomfort and giving never a thought either to the object of his desires or his assailant and rescuer. At last he shook himself like a dog, squeezed the water out of his sleeves, sprang to his feet and was off like a dart along the towpath in the direction of the tall fuming chimneys of the town.
Matilda and Old Mole walked slowly out toward the setting sun and in front of them for miles stretched the regiments of pollarded willows like mournful distorted human beings condemned forever to stand and watch over the still waters.
“Life,” said Old Mole, “is full of astonishments. I should never have thought it of myself.”
“He was very nearly drowned,” rejoined Matilda.
“It is very singular,” said he, more to himself than to her, “that one’s instinct should think such a life worth saving. A more bestial face I never saw.”
“I think,” said she, “you would help anybody whatever they were like.”
She took his arm and they walked on, as it seemed, into the darkness. Until they turned, neither spoke. He said:
“I am oddly miserable when I think that in a fortnightthe school will reopen and I shall not be there. I suppose it’s habit, but I want to go back and I know I never shall.”
“I don’t want never to go back.”
“Don’t you? But then you’re young and I’m rather old.”
“I don’t think of you as old. I always think of you as some one very good and sometimes you make me laugh.”
“Oh! Matilda, often, very often, you make me want to cry. And men don’t cry.”
A little scornfully Matilda answered:
“Don’tthey!”
Through his mournfulness he felt a glow of happiness, a little aching in his heart, a sort of longing and a pleasant pride in this excursion with a young woman clinging to his arm and treating him with sweet consideration and tenderness.
“After all,” he thought, “it is certainly true that when they reach middle age men do require an interest in some young life.”
So, having fished out a theory, as he thought, to meet the case, he was quite content and prepared, untroubled, to enjoy his happiness.
He did thoroughly enjoy his happiness. His newly awakened but unpracticed imagination worked like that of a sentimental and self-cloistered writer who, having no conception of human relationships, binds labels about the necks of his personages—Innocent Girlhood, Middle-aged Bachelorhood, Mother’s Love, Manly Honor, English Gentleman—and amuses himself and his readers with propping them up in the attitudes meet and right to their affixed characters. Except that he did not drag the Deity into it, Old Mole lived perfectly for a short space of time in a neatly rounded novelette, with himself as the touching, lamb-like hero and Matilda as the radiant heroine. He basked in it, and when on her he let loose a flood of what he thought to be emotion she only said:
“Oh! Go on!”
True to his sentimentality he was entirely unconscious of, absolutely unconcerned with, what she might be feeling. He only knew that he had been battered and bewildered and miserable and that now he was comfortable and at his ease.
The appointed end of all such things, in print and out of it, is marriage. Outside marriage there is no such thing as affection between man and woman (in that atmosphere passion and desire do not exist and children are not born but just crop up). True to his fiction—and how many men are ever true to anything else?—Old Mole came in less than a week to the idea of marriage with Matilda. It was offensive to his common sense, so repugnant indeed that it almost shocked him back into the world of fact and that hideous mental and spiritual flux from which he was congratulating himself on having escaped. He held his nose and gulped it down and sighed:
“Ah! Let us not look on the dark side of life!”
Then he asked himself:
“Do I love her? She has young dreams of love. How can I give her my love and not shatter them?”
And much more in this egoistic strain he said, the disturbance in his heart, or whatever organ may be the seat of the affections, having totally upset his sense of humor. He told himself, of course, that she was hardly the wife for a man of his position, but that was only by way of peppering his emotions, and he was really rather amazed when he came to the further reflection that, after all, he had no position. To avoid the consternation it brought he decided to ask Matilda’s hand in marriage.
As it turned out, to the utter devastation of his novelette, it was his hand that was asked.
He bought Matilda a new camisole. He had heard the word used by women and was rather staggered when he found what it was he had purchased. Confusedly he presented it to Innocent Girlhood. She giggled and then, with a shout of laughter, rushed off to show Mrs. Copas her gift. He did not on that occasion stammer out his proposal.
He took her for three walks and two tram-drives at fourpence each, but she was preoccupied and morose, and gave such vague answers to his preliminary remarks that his hopes died within him and he discussed the Insurance Act and Lancashire’s chances of defeating Yorkshire at Bradford. Moreover, Matilda was pale and drawn and not far from being downright ugly, far too plain for a noveletteat all events. He felt himself sliding backward and could hear the buzz and roar of the chaos within himself, and the novelette was unfinished and until he came to the last jaunting little hope in the future, the last pat on the back for the hero, the final distribution of sugar-plums all round, there would be no sort of security, no sealed circle wherein to dwell. He felt sick, and the nausea that came on him was worse than the fear and doubt through which he had passed. He was like a man after a long journey come hungry to an inn to find nothing to eat but lollipops.
When they returned from their last tram-drive they had supper with Mr. and Mrs. Copas, who discussed the new actors whom they had engaged, as only two of the old company were willing to return. The new comic had acted in London, in the West End, had once made his twenty pounds a week. They were proud of him, and Mr. Copas unblushingly denounced the Drink as the undoing of many a nartist. Very early in the evening, before any move had been made to clear the plates and dishes away, Matilda declared herself tired, and withdrew. Mr. Copas went on talking and Mrs. Copas began to make horrible faces at him, so that Old Mole, in the vagueness of his acute discomfort, thought mistily that perhaps they were at the beginning of an altercation, which would end—as their altercations ended. However, the talk wenton and the grimaces went on until at last Mr. Copas perceived that he was the object of them, stopped dead, seized his hat and left the room. Mrs. Copas beamed on Mr. Mole. She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. They were bare to the elbow and fat and coarse and red. She went on beaming, and nervously he took out a cigar and lit it. Mrs. Copas leaned forward and with a knife began to draw patterns with the mustard left on the edge of a plate.
“We’ll be on the move again soon, Mr. Mole.”
“I shall be glad of that.”
“What we want to know, what I want to know and what Mr. Copas wants to know is this. What are you going to do about it?”
“I . . . I suppose I shall go with you.”
“You know what I mean, Mr. Mole. Some folk ain’t particular. I am. And Mr. Copas is very careful about what happens in his theater. If it can’t be legitimate it can’t be and there’s nothing more to be said. . . . Now, Mr. Mole, what are you going to do?”
“My good woman! I haven’t the least idea what you are talking about. I have enjoyed my stay with you. I have found it very instructive and profitable and I propose to——”
“It’s Matilda, Mr. Mole. What’s done is done. We’re not saying anything about that. Some says it’s a curse and some says it’s the only thing worth living for. Matilda’s my own husband’s niece and I’ve got to see her properly done by whether you’reoffended with a little plain speaking or not, Mr. Mole.”
She had now traced a very passable spider’s web in mustard on the plate.
“If you need to be told, I must tell you, Mr. Mole. Matilda’s in the way.”
No definite idea came to Mr. Mole, but a funny little throb and trickle began at the base of his spine. He dabbed his cigar down into half a glass of beer that Mr. Copas had left.
“We’ve talked it out, Mr. Mole, and you’ve got to marry her or pay up handsome.”
Marry! His first thought was in terms of the novelette, but those terms would not embrace Mrs. Copas or her present attitude. His first glimpse of the physical fact was through the chinks of his sentimental fiction, and he was angry and hurt and disgusted. Then, the fiction never having been rounded off, he was able to escape from it—(rare luck in this world of deceit)—and he shook himself free of its dust and tinsel, and, responding to the urgency of the occasion, saw or half-saw the circumstances from Matilda’s point of view. Mentally he swept Mrs. Copas aside. The thing lay between himself and the girl. Out of her presence he could not either think or feel about it clearly. Only for himself there lay here and now, before him, the opportunity for action, for real, direct, effective action, which would lift him out of his despond and bring his life into touch with another life. It gave him what he most needed, movement, uplift, theoccasion for spontaneity, for being rid, though it might be only temporarily, of his fear and doubt and sickness of mind. Healthily, or rather, in his eagerness for health, he refused to think of the consequences. He lit another cigar, steadying himself by a chair-back, so dazzled was he by the splendor of his resolution and the rush of mental energy that had brought him to it, and said:
“Of course, if Matilda is willing, I will marry her.”
“I didn’t expect it of you, being a gentleman,” returned Mrs. Copas, obliterating her spider’s web, “and, marriage being the lottery it is, there are worse ways of doing it than that. After all, you do know you’re not drawing an absolute blank, which, I know, happens to more than ever lets on.”
Mr. Mole found that it is much easier to get married in life than in sentimental fiction. He never proposed to Matilda, never discussed the matter with her, only after the interview with Mrs. Copas she kissed him in the morning and in the evening, and as often in between as she felt inclined. He made arrangements with the registrar, bought a special license and a ring. He said: “I take you, Matilda Burn, to be my lawful wedded wife,” and she said: “I take you, Herbert Jocelyn Beenham, to be my lawful wedded husband.” Mrs. Copas sat on the registrar’s hat, and, without any other incident, they were made two in one and one in two.
In view of the approaching change in his condition he had written to his lawyer and his banker in Thrigsby, giving orders to have all his personal property realized and placed on deposit, also for five hundred pounds to be placed on account for Mrs. H. J. Beenham.
The day after his wedding came this letter from the Head Master:
“MYDEARBEENHAM:—I am delighted that your whereabouts has been discovered. All search for you has been unavailing—one would not have thought it so easy for a man to disappear—and I had begun to be afraid that you had gone abroad. As I say, I am delighted, and I trust you are having a pleasant vacation. I owe you, I am afraid, a profound apology. If there be any excuse, it must be put down to the heat and the strain of the end of the scholastic year. I was thinking, I protest, only of the ancient foundation which you and I have for so long served. The Chairman of the Governors, always, as you know, your friend, has denounced what he is pleased to call my Puritanical cowardice. The Police have made inquiries about the young woman and state that she is a domestic servant who left her situation in distressing circumstances without her box and without a character. I do apologize most humbly, my dear Beenham, and I look to see you in your place at the commencement of the approaching term.”
Old Mole read this letter three times, and the description of his wife stabbed him on each perusalmore deeply to the heart. He tore the sheet across and across and burned the pieces on the hearth. Matilda came in and found him at it: and when she spoke to him he gave no answer, but remained kneeling by the fender, turning the poker from one hand to the other.
“Are you cross with me?” she said.
“No. Not with you. Not with you. Not with you.”
“You don’t often say things three times.”
She came and laid her hands on his shoulders, and he took them and kissed them, for now he adored her.
In the evening came a knock at the front door. Mr. Mole was at the theater arranging for a new play with which to reopen when the boxing season, which had been extended, was over. The slut of a landlady took no notice, and the knock was repeated thrice. Matilda went down and opened the door and found on the step a short, plump, rotund, elegant little man with spectacles and a huge mustache. He asked for Mr. Beenham, and she said she was Mrs. Beenham. He drew himself up and was very stiff and said at the back of his throat:
“I am your husband’s brother.”
She took him upstairs to their sitting-room, and he told her how distressed he was at the news that had reached him and to find his brother living in such a humble place. He added that it was a seriousblow to all his family, but that, for his part, the world being what it was and life on it being also what it was, he hoped that all might be for the best. Matilda let him have his say and tactfully led him on to talk about himself, and he told her all about his practice at the Chancery Bar, and the wine at his club, and his rooms in Gray’s Inn, and his collection of Battersea china, and his trouble with the committee of his golf club, and his dislike for most of his relations except his brother Herbert, who was the last man in the world, as he said, he had ever expected to go off the rails. She assured him then that Herbert was the best and kindest of men, and that it would not be her fault if their subsequent career did not astonish and delight him. She did not drop a single aitch, and, noticing carefully his London pronunciation, she mentally resolved to change her broad a’s and in future to call a schoolmaster a schoolmarster. . . . Their conversation came abruptly to an end, and she produced a pack of cards and taught him how to play German whist. From that he led her to double-dummy Bridge, and they were still at it when his brother returned. Matilda was scolded for being up so late, kissed, by both men, and packed off to bed.
Whisky was produced. Said brother Robert:
“Well, of all the lunatics!”
“So you’ve been shocked and amazed and horrified. Do the others know?”
“Not yet. . . . I thought I’d better see you first.”
“All right. Tell them that I’m married and have become a rogue and a vagabond.”
“You’re not going on with this?”
“I am.”
“Don’t be a fool. Your wife’s perfectly charming. There’s nothing against her.”
“That’s had nothing to do with it. I’m going on for my own satisfaction. I’ve spent half my life in teaching. I want to spend the rest of it in learning.”
“From play-actors? Oh! come!”
“My dear Robert, life isn’t at all what you think it is. It isn’t what I thought it was. I’m interested. I’m eager. I’m keen. . . .”
“And mad. . . .”
“Maybe. But I tell you that life’s got a heart to it somewhere, and I’m going to find my way to it.”