Money poured in.Five companies were sent out with “Lossie Loses” in America, three in England, and the play was given in Australia and South Africa. It was also published. Money poured in. It came in tens, in hundreds, in thousands of pounds. It became a purely automatic process, and Old Mole quickly lost interest in it and ceased to think about it. He told himself that it would soon come to an end, that sucha violent eruption of gold could not last very long, and his attention was engrossed by its effects.In his own mind it had brought about no moral crisis like that of his first catastrophe, but, insensibly, it had altered his point of view, given him a sense of security that was almost paralyzing in its comfort. All his old thoughts had been in self-protection against the people with whom he had come in contact, people to whom he was a stranger, different from themselves, and therefore suspect. But now in London when he met new people they bowed before him, put themselves out to ingratiate him, almost, it seemed, though he hated to think so, to placate him. His name was known. He was Mr. Beenham, and was somehow responsible for “Lossie Loses,” which everybody had seen and the public so loved that three matinées a week were necessary, and there were beginning to be Lossie collars and Lossie hats and Lossie muffs and Lossie biscuits and Lossie corsets. . . . And his sister had called on Matilda and removed that source of bitterness. And at the club men sought his acquaintance. He had letters from more than one of his old colleagues at Thrigsby and several of his former pupils sought him out. A few of them were distinguished men—a doctor, a barrister, a journalist, the editor of a weekly literary review. They invited him to their houses, and he was delighted with the ease and grace with which Matilda bore herself and was more than a match for their wives, and became friendly with one or two of them. Theymoved among people whose lives were easy and smooth-running in roomy, solidly furnished houses, all very much like each other in style and taste. The people they met at these houses in South Kensington and Hampstead were almost monotonously alike. At the doctor’s house they met doctors, at the barrister’s solicitors and more barristers, at the editor’s journalists and writers. They were different only in their professions: those apart, they were as alike as fossil ammonites in different strata: and they all “loved” “Lossie Loses.” The women were very kind to Matilda and invited her to their tea parties and “hen” luncheons. She read the books they read and began to have “views” and opinions, and to know the names of the twentieth century poets; she picked up a smattering of the jargon of painting and music just as she caught the trick of being smart in her dress, and for the same reason, because the other women had “views” and opinions and talked of music and painting and were smart in their dress. The eruption of gold into their lives had blown her desire to return to the theater into the air. She was fully occupied with dressing, buying clothes, ever more clothes, and arranging for the hospitality they received and gave.Her husband was amazed at the change in her. It was as startling as the swift growth of a floundering puppy into a recognizable dog. It was not merely a matter of pinning on clothes and opinions and a set of fashionable ideas: there was real growth in the woman which enabled her to wearthese gewgaws with ease and grace so that they became her and were an ornament, absurd it is true, but so generally worn—though rarely with such tact—that their preposterousness was never noticed in the crowd. She was gayer and easier, and she seemed to have lost the tug and strain at her heart. Often in the daytime she was dull and listless, but she never failed to draw upon some mysterious reserve of vitality for the evening.He was sometimes alarmed when he watched the other women who had not her freshness, and saw how some of them had ceased to be anything but views and opinions and clothes. But he told himself that she was not tied, as the rest were, by their husband’s professions, to London, and that they could always go away when they were tired of it. . . . He was often bored and exhausted, but he put up with it all, partly because of the pleasure she was finding in that society, and partly because he felt that he was getting nearer that indeterminate but magnetically irresistible goal which had been set before him on—when was it?—on the night when his thoughts had taken form and life and he had been launched into that waking dreamland. With that, even the most violent happenings seemed to have very little to do; they were almost purely external. One might have a startling adventure every day, and be no nearer the goal. One might have so many adventures that his capacity to enjoy them would be exhausted. There was, he felt sure, as he pondered the existence of these professional peopleand saw how many of them were jaded by habit, but were carried on by the impetus of the habits of their kind, so that they were forever seeking to crowd into their days and nights far more people, thoughts, ideas, books, æsthetic emotions than they would hold—there was somewhere in experience a point at which living overflowed into life and was therein justified. So much seemed clear, and it was that point that he was seeking. In his relationship with Matilda, in his love for her, he had striven to force his way to it. The violence of his meeting with her, the brutality of his breach with his old existence, had, by reflex action, led him to violence and brutality even in his kindness, even in his attempted sympathy.That seemed sound reasoning, and it led him to the knowledge that Matilda had plunged into the life of the professional people with its round of pleasures and functions, its absorption in tailors and mummers and the amusers of the people, its entire devotion to amusement, as a protection against himself. It was an unpleasant realization, but amid so much pleasantness it was bracing.Money poured in. “Lossie Loses” was visited by all the Royal Family. When it had been performed two hundred and fifty times the Birthday Honors list was published and Henry Butcher was acclaimed “our latest theatrical knight.” He gave a supper party on the stage to celebrate the two occasions; and he invited Mr. and Mrs. Beenham.There were present the Solicitor-General, Mr. Justice Sloppy, the three celebrated daughters of two dukes, the daughters-in-law of three Cabinet Ministers, a millionaire, two novelists, five “absolutely established” dramatists, three dramatic critics, nine theatrical knights, the ten most beautiful women in London, the Keeper of the Coptic Section of the South Kensington Museum, Tipton Mudde, the aviator, and Archdeacon Froude, the Chaplain of the Actors’ Union. There were others who were neither named nor catalogued in the newspaper (Court and Society) next day. As Mr. Justice Sloppy said, in the speech of the evening: “For brains and beauty he had never seen anything like it. . . .” The toasts were the King, Sir Henry Butcher, Lossie, and the Public, and there, as Panoukian remarked when the feast was described to him, you have the whole thing in a nutshell, the topnotch of English philosophy, the expression of the English ideal, lots of food, lots of drink, lots of talk, of money, of people, and then a swollen gratitude—“God bless us every one.” And Panoukian then developed a theory that England, the English character, had reached its zenith and come to flower and fruit in the genius of Charles Dickens. Thereafter was nothing but the fading of leaves, the falling of leaves, the drowsing into hibernation. He was excited by the idea of falling leaves to describe the intellectual and moral activity of the country. It would seem to explain the extraordinary predominance of the Harbottles, who were so thick uponevery English institution that Vallombrosa was nothing to it.Old Mole met Tyler Harbottle again, and, allowing for Panoukian’s youthful exaggeration, had to admit the justice of his estimate. Harbottle was very like a falling leaf, blown hither and thither upon every gust of wind, dropping, skimming, spinning in the air, but all the time obeying only one impulse, the law of gravity, which sent him down to the level of the ground, the public. Seeing nothing but the public, nothing beyond it, hoping for nothing but a comfortable resting place when at last he came to earth, Harbottle was under the illusion that the winds that tossed him came from the public, and when they blew him one way he said, “I will go that way,” and when they blew him another he said, “I will go this.” He was a Unionist Free Trader in theory and by label: in practice he was an indefatigable wirepuller. By himself he was unimportant, but there were so many of him and his kind that he had to be placated.Old Mole met all the Harbottles. After Sir Henry Butcher’s party he and Matilda were squeezed up into a higher stratum of society. Tipton Mudde took Matilda up in his monoplane and thereafter their whole existence grew wings and flew. They now met the people of whom their professional acquaintances had talked. The triumph of “Lossie Loses” continued: it was said the play would beat the record of “Our Boys.” Money poured in, and almost as bewildering was the number ofinvitations—to vast dinner parties, to at homes, to drawing-room meetings, to boxes at the Opera, to luncheons at the luxurious hotels, to balls, to political receptions, to banquets given to celebrate honors won or to mark the end of a political campaign, or to welcome an actor-manager home from Australia. Whenever a Harbottle pulled out a plum from the pie than the subtler Harbottles buzzed like flies around it and arranged to eat and drink and make merry or at least to make speeches.For a time it was very good fun. Old Mole and Matilda did as the Harbottles did. They had so many engagements that they were compelled to buy a motorcar and to engage a chauffeur. Without it Matilda could never have found time to buy her clothes. She went to the dressmaker patronized by all the female Harbottles, but the dressmaker made for an old-fashioned duchess, who adhered to the figure of the nineties and refused to be straight-fronted. The female Harbottles fled from this horrid retrogression and made the fortune of an obscure little man in Chelsea.It was good fun for a time, and Old Mole was really interested. Here on the top of English life, its head and front—for the great-leisured governing classes no longer governed; they had feudal possessions but not the feudal political power—was a little world whizzing like a zoetrope. You might peep through the chinks and the figures inside it would seem to be alive, but when you were inside it there were just a number of repetitions of the samefigures in poses disintegrated from movement. The machine whizzed round, but what was the force that moved it? Impossible to enter it except by energy or some fluke that made you rich enough or famous enough for there to be flattery in your acquaintance. True, Old Mole only saw the figures inside the machine arranged for pleasure. They were workers, too, but their pleasure was a part of their work. Lawyers who were working eighteen hours a day could find time to visit three great entertainments in an evening; politicians after an all-night sitting in the House could dine out, see two acts of the Opera, or the ballet, or an hour or so of a revue, and then return to the division Lobbies; actors, after two performances in the day, could come on to a reception at midnight and eat caviare and drink champagne. There were very few of whom it could be said that the rout was the breath of their nostrils; but all continued in it, all accepted it as a normal condition of things, as the proper expression of the nation’s finest energies. Impossible to avoid it, furtherance of ambition and young devotion to an ideal both led to it. . . . Pitchforked into it so suddenly, with so many vivid impressions after wanderings, Old Mole felt how completely it was cut off from the life of the country, because from the inside and the outside of the machine things looked so entirely different. He had to go no further than his own case. On all hands he heard it said so often that “Lossie Loses” was a wonderful play—“so delicate, so fanciful, so full of the poetry of common things”—that itneeded only a very little weakening of his critical faculty for him to begin to believe it and greedily to accept the position it had given him. As it was, knowing its intrinsic falsehood and baseness, he marveled that people of so much intelligence could be bemused by success into such jockeying of their standards. But he began to perceive that there were no standards, neither of life nor of art. There could not be, for there was no time for valuation, just as there was no time for thinking. Here and there he found an ideal or two, but such wee, worn, weary little things, so long bandied about among brains that could not understand them and worried into a decline by the shoddy rhetorical company they had been forced to keep. Arguing from his own case, Old Mole came to the conclusion that the whole whirligig had come about from a constant succession of decent ordinary mortals having been, like himself, the victims of an eruption of gold which had carried them, without sufficient struggle or testing of imagination or moral quality, to an eminence above their fellows, upon which, in their bewilderment, they were conscious of nothing but a dread of falling down. In that dread, sharing no other emotion, they clung together fearfully, met superficially, were never content unless they were meeting superficially, creating flattery and even more flattery to cover their dread. And, as they were forever gazing downward into the depths from which they had been raised, it was impossible for them to see more than a yard or so further than their own feet. Fearfulof taking a false step, they never moved; their minds curled up and went to sleep. They could create nothing, and could only imitate and reproduce. They had abandoned the dull habits of the middle class and yet were the slaves of middle-class ideas. There were very charming people among them, but they accepted good-humoredly that England had nothing better to offer. They had pleasant houses in Town and in the country, delightful and amusing people to visit them, to keep them from boredom, and they asked no more.Old Mole studied the history of England, the railway frenzy, the growth of the manufacturing districts, the foundation of the great shipbuilding yards, the immense eruption of gold that had swept away the old, careless, negligent, ruling squires, and set in their place those who could survive the scramble. And the scramble had never ceased; it had been accepted as the normal state of things. The heat and excitement of the rout gave the illusion of energy, which, being without moral direction, was pounced upon by the English desire for comfort and the appearance of solidarity, the mania for having the best of everything in the belief that it will never be bettered. So against the inconveniences of an antiquated system of laws, a mean and narrow code of morals, the consequences of their own reckless disregard of health in the building of the great cities of industry, in the payment of those who labored in them, they padded themselves in with comfort, more and more of it.“Almost,” said Old Mole, “I am persuaded to become a Jew, to sweat the sweaters, pick the profits, rule the world in honor of the cynical Hebrew god who created it, and live in uneasy triumph in the domestic virtues and worship of the flesh uncrucified.”Once you have been drawn into the machine it is very difficult to get out of it. Old Mole struggled, but money and invitations came pouring in. “Lossie Loses” survived two holiday seasons. During the second the actress who played Lossie went away on her vacation, and Matilda, urged on by Butcher, with whom she had become friendly, played the part, was successful, and gave the piece a new spurt of vitality. It was not a brilliant performance, but then a brilliant performance would have killed the play. The play needed charm, Matilda had it, and, by this time, among so many expertly charming women, she had learned how to manipulate it. Her appearance on the stage extended her popularity among her distinguished acquaintances, but subtly changed her status, and she had to learn how to defend herself. Her life became more exciting and she expanded in response to it. She distressed Old Mole by talking about her adventures, and he began to think it was really time to go.They went abroad for several months, to Paris, Florence, Rome, Sicily, Algiers, but as they stayed in luxurious and expensive hotels they might almost as well have stayed in London. Old Mole discoverednothing except that the eruption of gold must have been universal and that the character of the English nation had found its most obvious expression in its stout, solid, permanent telegraph poles.They returned to London, and Matilda accepted a small part in a new play by a famous dramatist, who had borrowed “Lossie” from the “greatest success of the century,” called her “Blendy,” and set her to leaven the mixture he had produced after the two years’ hard work fixed as the proper quantum by Henrik Ibsen.More success.And Old Mole, feeling that he was now beyond all hope of escape, since he was suffering from a noticeable fatty degeneration of the will, had argued with Matilda, but she had had her way, for he could find no rejoinder to her plea that it was “something to do.”He refused to leave Gray’s Inn. She was tired of it; said the rooms were cramped, but he clung to it as an anchorage.There was a steadying of their existence. She took her work seriously, and rested as much as possible during the day. In the evenings he missed her, and he detested having his dinner at half-past six. But the discomfort was a relief and gave him a much needed sharpening of the wits. Every night he met her at the theater and made more acquaintances in it. He applied his theory of the eruption of gold to them, and, studying them for that purpose, wasamazed to find how little different they were from Mr. Copas and the miserable John Lomas. Copas had been untouched by the eruption. These men, and particularly Henry Butcher and Matilda’s manager, were Copas varnished and polished. Beneath the varnish they were exactly the same; self-important, self-centered, entirely oblivious of life outside the theater, utterly unheeding of everything outside their profession that could not be translated into its cant and jargon, childishly jealous, greedy of applause, sensitive of opinion, boys with the appetites and desires of grown men, human beings whose development had been arrested, who, in a healthy society, would be rogues and vagabonds, or wandering adventurers, from sheer inability to accept the restrictions and discipline imposed by social responsibility. They were cruelly placed, for they were in a position needing adult powers, having audiences night after night vaster than could be gathered for any divine or politician or demagogue; they had to win their own audiences, for no theater was subsidized; and when they had won them they were mulcted in enormous sums for rent; they were sucked, like the other victims of the eruption, into the machine, the zoetrope, and being there, in that trap and lethal chamber of spontaneity, they had to charm their audiences, with nothing more than the half-ideas, the sentimental conventions, the clipped emotions of their fellow sufferers. They were squeezed out of their own natures, forced into new skins, could only retain their positions by the successfulpractice of their profession, and were forced to produce plays and shows out of nothing, being robbed both of their Copas-like delight in their work and of their material for it. Their position was calamitous and must have been intolerable without the full measure of applause and flattery bestowed on them.Clearly it was not through the theater that Old Mole could find the outlet he was seeking.He turned wearily from its staleness, and told himself, after long pondering of the problem, that he had been mistaken, that he had been foolishly, and a little arrogantly, seeking in life the imaginative force, the mastery of ideas and human thoughts and feelings that he had found in literature. Life, maybe, proceeds through eruption and epidemic; art through human understanding and sympathy and will. . . . That pleased him as a definite result, but at once he was offended by the separation, yet, amid so much confusion, it was difficult to resist the appeal of so clean and sharp a conception. It lost the clarity of its outline when he set it against his earlier idea of living brimming over into life. . . . There were then three things, living, life and art, a Trinity, three lakes fed by the same river. That was large and poetic, but surely inaccurate. For, in that order, the lakes must be fed by a strange river that flowed upward. . . . Anyhow, it was something to have established the three things which could comprise everything that had penetrated his own consciousness, three things which were of the same essence,expressions of the same force. Within the action and interaction there seemed to be room for everything, even for Sir Henry Butcher, even for Tyler Harbottle, M.P.He had arrived at the sort of indolent charity which, in the machine, passes for wisdom and sanity, the unimaginative tolerance which furs and clogs all the workings of a man’s mind and heart. It is not far removed from indifference. . . . In his weariness, the exhaustion and satiety of the modern world, he measured his wisdom by the folly of others, and in his satisfaction at the discrepancy found conceit and thought it confidence. He began to write again and returned to his projected essay on Woman, believing that he had in his idea disentangled the species from Matilda. He was convinced that he had risen above his love for her, to the immense profit of their relationship, which had become more solid, settled and pleasurable. As he had planned when they came to London, so it had happened. They had gone their ways, seemed for a time to lose sight of each other, met again, and were now—were they not?—journeying on apace along life’s highway, hailing the travelers by the road, aiding the weary, cracking a joke and a yarn with those of good cheer, staying in pleasant inns.“Something like a marriage!” thought he. “Life’s fullest adventure.”And he measured his marriage against those of the men and women in the machine; sour captivityfor the most part, or a shallow, prattling and ostentatious devotion.His essay on Woman was only a self-satisfied description of his marriage. Out of the writing of it came no profit except to his vanity. Preoccupied with questions of style, he pruned and pared it down, refashioned and remodeled it until at last he could not read it himself. Having no convenient sands in which to bury it, he gave it to Panoukian to read.Panoukian was in that stage of development (which has nothing to do with age) when a man needs to find his fellows worshipful and looks for wonders from them. He was very young, and kindness from a man older than himself could bowl him over completely, set his affections frothing and babbling over his judgment, so that he became enslaved and sycophantish, and prepared, mentally if not physically, to stand on his head if it so happened that the object of his admiration could be served by it. He was in a nervous state of flux, possessing small mastery over his faculties, many of which were only in bud; his life was so little his own, was so shapeless and unformed that there could be no moderation in him; his admirations were excessive, had more than once landed him in the mire, so that he was a little afraid of them, and to guard against these dangers sought refuge in intolerance. To prevent himself seeing beauty and nobility and being intoxicated by them, he created bugbears for himself and hated them, and was forever tracking them down and finding their marks in the mootinnocent persons and places. He was very young, mightily in love with love, so that he was forever guarding himself from coming to it too early and being fobbed off with love cheapened or soiled. His passion was for “reality,” of which he had only the most shapeless and uncommunicable conception, but he was always talking about it with fierce denunciations of all the people who seemed to him to be deliberately, with criminal folly, burking it. For this reality his instinct was to preserve himself, and he lived in terror of his loneliness driving him to headlong falls from which he might never be able to recover. He was a full-blooded, healthy young man and must have been wretchedly unhappy had it not been that people, in their indolent, careless way, were often enough kind to him to draw off some of his accumulated enthusiasm in an explosive admiration and effusive, though tactfully manipulated, affection. Old Mole was kinder to him than anyone had ever been except his father, but then his father had had no other methods than those of common sense, while in Old Mole there was a subtlety always surprising and refreshing. Also Old Mole was prepared almost indefinitely, as it seemed, to listen to Panoukian’s views and opinions and rough winnowing of the wheat from the chaff of life, so far as he had experienced it.Panoukian therefore read Old Mole’s manuscript with the fervor of a disciple, and found in it the heat and vigor which he himself always brought to their discussions. The essay, indeed, was likethe master’s talk, cool and deliberate, broken in its monotony by comical little stabs of malice. The writing was fastidious and competent. Panoukian thought the essay a masterpiece, and there crept a sort of reverence into his attitude toward its author. This was an easy transition, for he had never quite shaken off the rather frightened respect of the pupil for the schoolmaster. Then, to complete his infatuation, he contrasted Old Mole with his employer, Harbottle.And Old Mole was fond of Panoukian. At first it was the sort of amused tenderness which it is impossible not to feel on the sight of a leggy colt in a field or a woolly kitten staggering after a ball. Then, by association and familiarity, it was enriched and became a thing as near friendship as there can be between men of widely different ages, between immaturity and ripeness. It saved the situation for both of them, the young man from his wildness, the older from the violent distortion of values which had become necessary if he were to move easily and comfortably in the swim. Above all, for Old Mole, it was amusing. For Panoukian nothing was amusing. In his intense longing for the “reality” of his dreams he hated amusement; he detested the vast expenditure of energy in the modern world on making existence charming and pleasant and comfortable, the elaborate ingenuity with which the facts of life were hidden and glossed over; he despised companionable books, and fantastical pictures and plays, luxurious entertainments, magazines filledwith advertisements and imbecile love-stories, kinematographs, spectacular football, could not understand how any man could devote his energies to the creation of them and retain his sincerity and honesty. He adored what he called the English genius, and was disappointed and hurt because the whole of English life was not a spontaneous expression of it, and he found one of his stock examples in architecture. He would storm and inveigh against the country because the English architectural tradition had been allowed to lapse away back in the dark ages of the nineteenth century. He had many other instances of the obscuring or sudden obliteration of the fairest tendencies of the English genius, and to their mutual satisfaction, Old Mole would put it all down to his theory of the eruption of gold.Nearly all Panoukian’s leisure was spent at Gray’s Inn or out with Old Mole and Matilda, or with them on their visits to those of their friends to whom they had introduced him. He was good-looking, well built, easily adept at ball-games—for he possessed a quick, sure eye—and his shy frankness made him likeable. The charm of English country life would soften his violence and soothe his prejudices, but only the more, when he returned to London, would he chafe against the incessant pursuit of material advantages, the mania of unselective acquisition, the spinning and droning of the many-colored humming-top.From the first moment he had been Matilda’s slave, and no trouble was too great, no time toolong, no task too tedious, if only he could yield her some small service. He would praise her to Old Mole:“She is so real. Compare her with other women. She does all the things they do, and does them better. She takes them in her stride. She can laugh with you, talk with you, understand what you mean better than you do yourself, give you just the little encouragement you need, and you can talk to her and forget that she is a woman. . . . You don’t know, sir, what an extraordinary difference it has made in my life since I have known you two.”That would embarrass Old Mole, and he found it impossible to say anything without jarring Panoukian’s feelings. Therefore he would say nothing, and later he would look at Matilda, watch her, wait for her smile, and wonder. Her smile was the most surprising, the most intimate gift he ever had from her. Often for days together they would hardly see each other and, when they met, would have little to say, but he would watch until he could meet her gaze, win a smile from her, and feel her friendliness, her interest, and know that they still had much to share and were still profoundly aware of each other. He would say to her sometimes:“I don’t see much of you nowadays.”She would answer:“But you are so interested in so many things. And I like my life.”And in the gentle gravity with which she now spoke to him, which was in every gesture of herattitude toward him, he would discern a fuller grace than any he had hoped to find in her. She was so trim and neat, so well disciplined, so delicate and nice in all she did; restrained and subtle but with no loss of force. Even her follies, the absurd modish tricks she had caught in the theater and among the women who fawned on her, seemed no impediment to her impulse should the moment come for yielding to it. She was no more spendthrift of emotion and affection than she was of money, and, almost, he thought, too thorough in her self-effacement and endeavor to be no kind of burden upon him.“I am so proud of you!” he would say.And she would smile and answer:“You don’t know, you never will know, how grateful I am to you.”But her eyes would gaze far beyond him, through him, and light up wistfully, and he would have a queer discomfortable sensation of being a sojourner in his own house. Then he would think and puzzle over Panoukian’s rapturous description of her. She was discreet and guarded: only her smile was intimate; her thoughts, if she had thoughts, were shy and never sought out his; demonstrative she never was. She led a busy, active life, the normal existence of moneyed or successful women in London, and she was distinguished in her efficiency. She had learned and developed taste, and was ever transforming the chambers in Gray’s Inn, driving out Robert and installing in every corner of it theexpression of her own personality. After the first dazzling discovery of the possibilities of clothes she had rebelled against the price charged by the fashionable dressmakers and made her own gowns. Robert used to twit her about her restlessness, and declared that one week when he came he would find her wearing the curtains, and the next her gown would be covering the cushions. Old Mole used to tease her, too, but what she would take quite amiably from Robert she could not endure from him.“I thought you’d like it,” she would say.“But, my dear, I do like it!”“Then why do you make fun of me?”And sometimes there would be tears. Once it came to a quarrel, and after they had made it up she said she wanted a change, and went off to stay with Bertha Boothroyd. In two days she was back again with the most maliciously funny description of Jim’s reception of her and his absolute refusal to leave her alone with Bertha lest she should be contaminated. Then she was gay and light-hearted, glad to be back again and more busy than ever, and when Panoukian came to see them she teased him out of his solemnity and earnestness almost into tears of rage. She told him he ought to go to Thrigsby and work, find some real work to do and not loaf about in London, in blue socks and white spats, waiting until he was old enough to be taken seriously.He went away in the depths of misery, and she said to Old Mole:“Why don’t you find him something to do?”“I? How can I find him. . . ?”“Don’t you know that you are a very important person? You know everybody who is anybody, and there is nobody you can’t know if you want to. Think of the hundreds of men in London who spend their whole lives struggling to pull themselves up into your position so that in the end they may have the pleasure of jobbing some one into a billet.”“That,” said Old Mole, “is what Panoukian calls Harbottling.”She made him promise to think it over, and he began to dream of a career for Panoukian, a real career on the lines of Self-Help.In his original pedagogic relation with Panoukian he had blocked out for him an ascent upon well-marked and worn steps through Oxford into the Home Civil Service, wherein by the proper gradations he should rise to be a Permanent Under-Secretary and a Knight, and a credit to the school. To the altered Panoukian and to Old Mole’s changed and changing mind that ambitious flight was now inadequate. Panoukian was undoubtedly intelligent. Old Mole had not yet discovered the idea that could baffle him, and he was positively reckless in his readiness to discard those which neither fitted into the philosophy he for the moment held nor seemed to lead to a further philosophy at which he hoped to arrive. Every day Panoukian became more youthful and every day more breathlessly irreverent. Nothing was sacred to him: he insisted on selectinghis own great men, and Old Mole was forced to admit that there was some wisdom in his choice. He read Voltaire and hated organized religion; Nietzsche and detested the slothfulness and mean egoism of the disordered collection of human lives called democracy; Butler and quizzed at the most respected and dozing of English institutions; Dostoevsky and yearned out in a thinly passionate sympathy to the suffering and the diseased and the victims of grinding poverty. He was not altogether the slave of his great men: after all they were dead; life went on and did not repeat itself, and he (Panoukian) was in the thick of it, and determined not to be crushed by it into a cushioned ease or the sodden insensibility of too great misery.“My problem,” he would say, “is myself. My only possible and valid contribution to any general problem is the effective solution of that. In other words, can I or can I not become a human being? If I succeed I help things on by that much; if I fail, I become a Harbottle and retard things by that much. Do you follow me?”Old Mole was not at all sure that he did, but he found Panoukian refreshing, for there was in him something both to touch the affections and excite the mind, and in his immediate surroundings there was very little to do as much. There were men who talked, men who did little or nothing else; but they lacked warmth, they were Laputans living on a floating island above a land desolate in the midst of plenty. Among such men it was difficult to conceiveof Panoukian finding a profitable occupation. Take him out of politics, and where could he be placed? For what had his education fitted him? Panoukian had had every kind of education. He had begun life in an elementary school, passed on by his own cleverness to a secondary school, and from that to the university where contact with the ancient traditions of English culture, manhood and citizenship had flung him into revolt and set him thinking about life before he had lived, braying about among philosophies before he had need of any. There was a fine stew in his brain, a tremendous array of ideas beleaguering Panoukian without there being any actual definite Panoukian to beleaguer. Certainly Old Mole could not remember ever having been in such a state himself, nor in any generation subsequent to his own could he remember symptoms which could account for the phenomenon. He had to look far to discover other Panoukians. They were everywhere, male and female. He set himself to discover them; they were in journalism, in science, in the schools of art, on the stage, writing wonderfully bad books, producing mannered and deliberately ugly verse, quarreling among themselves, wrangling, detesting each other, impatient, intolerant, outraging convention and their affectionate and well-meaning parents and guardians, united only in the one savage determination not to lick the boots of the generation that preceded them. When they could admire they worshiped; they needed to admire; they wanted to admire all men,and those men whom they found unadmirable they hated.It was all very well (thought Old Mole) for Matilda with her cool common sense to say that Panoukian must do something. What could he do? His only positive idea seemed to be that he would not become a Harbottle; and how better could he set about that than by living among the species with the bitterness of his hatred sinking so deep into his soul that in the end it must become sweetness? In theory Panoukian was reckless and violent; in practice he was affectionate and generous, much too full of the spasmodic, shy kindness of the young to fit into the Self-Help tradition. Indeed, it was just here that the Panoukians, male and female, were so astonishing. For generations in England personal ambition had been the only motive force, the sole measure of virtue, and it was personal ambition that they utterly ignored. They were truly innocent of it. Upon that axis the society in which they were born revolved. They could not move with it, for it seemed to them stationary, and it was abhorrent to them. Their thoughts were not the thoughts of the people around them. They could neither speak the old language nor invent a new speech in which to make themselves understood. Virtue they could perceive in their young hunger for life, but virtue qualified by personal ambition and subserving it they could not understand. They were asking for bread and always they were offered stones. . . . Old Mole could not see what better he could do than be kindto Panoukian, defend him from his solitude and give him the use of the advantages in the “swim” of London which he had no mind himself to employ.One of the few definite and tangible planks in Panoukian’s program was a stubborn conviction that he must have an “idea” of everything. It was, he insisted, abominable to live in London unless there was in his mind a real conception of London.“You see,” he would say, “it would be charming and pleasant to accept London as consisting of the Temple, the House and Gray’s Inn, with an imperceptible thread of vitality other than my own to bind them together. We’ve had enough of trying to make life charming and pleasant. All that is just swinish rolling in the mud. Do you follow me? We’ve had enough. We were begotten and conceived and born in the mud, and we’ve got to get out of it; and, unless you see that mud is mud, you can’t see the hills beyond, and the clear rivers, and the sky. Can you?”“No, you can’t,” said Old Mole, groping about in his incoherence, and speaking only because Panoukian was waiting for a shove into his further speculations.“I mean, London may be all in a mess, which it is, but if I haven’t a clear idea of the mess I can’t begin to mop it up, and I can’t begin on it at all until I’ve cleaned up the bit of the mess that is in myself, can I? I mean, take marriage, for instance.”“By all means, take marriage.”“Well, you’re married and I’m not, but it isn’t a bit of good screaming about marriage unless your own marriage is straightened out and,—you know what I mean?—understood, is it? . . .”So he would go on, whirling from one topic to another—marriage, morals, democracy, the will to power,—thinking in sharp contrasts, sometimes hardly thinking, but feeling always. Vaguely, without objects, catching himself out in some detestable sentimentality, admitting it frankly and going back again over his whole argument to pluck it out. Panoukian was to himself a weedy field, and with bowed back and stiffened loins he was engrossed in stubbing it. It was exhausting to watch him at it, and when, as sometimes happened, Old Mole saw things through Panoukian’s eyes he was disquieted. Then there seemed no security in existence; civilization was no longer an achievement, but a fluid stream flowing over a varied bed—rock, pebbles, mud, sand; society was no establishment, but a precarious, tottering thing, a tower of silted sands with an oozy base, blocking the river, squeezing it into a narrow and unpleasant channel. In the nature of things and its law the river would one day gather unto itself great waters and bear the sands away. . . . Meanwhile men strove to make the sand heap habitable, for they were born on it, lived and died on it, and never looked beyond. Their whole lives were filled with dread of its crumbling, their whole energies devoted to building up against it and against the action of wind and rain and sun. Theybuilt themselves in and looked not out, and made their laws by no authority but only by expediency. And the young men, in their vitality too great for such confinement, knew that somewhere there must be firm ground, and were determined to excavate and to explore. And Old Mole wished them well in the person of Panoukian.That young man set himself to discover London. He was forever coming to Gray’s Inn with exciting tales of streets discovered down by the docks or in the great regions of the northern suburbs. He set himself to walk from end to end of it, from Ealing to West Ham, from Dulwich to Tottenham, and he vowed that there were men really living in it, and he began to think of the democracy as a real entity, to be exalted at the thought of its power. Old Mole demurred. The democracy had no power, since it knew not how to grasp it. Its only instrument was the vote, which was the engine of the Harbottles, the nibblers, the place-seekers, the pleasure-hunters, those who scrambled to the top of the sandy tower, where in the highest cavern there were at least air and light and only the faintest stench from the river’s mud. Here there was so much divergence between Old Mole and Panoukian that they ceased to talk the same language, and Old Mole would try another tack and reach the stop-gap conclusion that the difference came about from the fact that Gray’s Inn was very comfortable, while Panoukian’s chambers in the Temple were bleak and bare. Thatwas unsatisfactory, for Panoukian would inveigh against comfort and vow, as indeed was obvious, that no one had yet devised a profitable means of spending a private income of thirty thousand a year. After reading an economic treatise he came to the conclusion that the whole political problem resolved itself into the wages question. Old Mole hated problems and questions. They parched his imagination. His whole pleasure in Panoukian’s society lay in the young man’s power to flood ideas with his vitality. He argued on economic lines and gradually forced the young man up to the spiritual plane and then gave him his conception of society as a sand heap. That fired Panoukian. Was it or was it not necessary for human beings to live upon shifting ground, with no firm foothold? And he said that the great men had been those who had gone out into the world and brought back tales of the fair regions contained therein.“They have dreamed of fair regions,” said Old Mole, “but no man has ever gone out to them.”“Then,” said Panoukian, “it is quite time some one did.”Matilda came in on that, caught the last words, and asked hopefully:“What is it you are going to do?”“He is going,” said Old Mole, “to discover the bedrock of life and live on it.”“Is that all?” Matilda looked disappointed. “I hoped it was something practical at last.”The two men tried to carry on the discussion, butshe closured it by saying that she wanted to be taken out to dinner and amused. Panoukian flew to dress himself in ordered black and white, and Matilda said to Old Mole:“The trouble with you two is that you have too much money.”“That, my dear, is the trouble with almost everybody, and, like everybody else, we sit on it and talk.”“It would do you both a world of good to have some real hard, unpleasant work.”“I can’t agree with you. For twenty-five years I had real, hard, unpleasant work five days in the week, and it profited neither myself nor anybody else. I went on with it because it seemed impossible to leave it. It left me, and my life has been a much brighter and healthier thing to me. Panoukian is young enough to talk himself into action. I shall go on talking forever.”And he went on talking. Matilda produced a workbox and a pile of stockings and began darning them. They sat one on either side of the fireplace, and in the chimney sounded the explosive coo of a pigeon.“My dear,” said Old Mole, “you know, I believe in Panoukian. I believe he will make something of himself. I fancy that when he is mature enough to know what he wants he will be absolutely ruthless in making for it.”“Do you?”Matilda rolled a pair of stockings up into a balland tossed them into a basket on the sofa some yards away. It was a neat shot, and Old Mole admired the gesture with which she made it, the fling of the arm, the swift turn of the wrist.“I do,” he said. “Until then there can be no harm in his talking.”“No. I suppose not. But you do go on so.”Panoukian returned. Matilda made ready, and they set out. Old Mole took them up to the Holborn gate and watched them walk along toward Chancery Lane. It was a July evening. He watched them until they were swallowed up in the hurrying crowd, the young man tall and big, towering above Matilda small and neat. He saw one or two men in the street turn and look at her, at them perhaps, for they made a handsome couple. He admired them and was moved, and a mist covered his spectacles. He took them off and wiped them. Then, kindling to the thought of a quiet evening to end in the excitement of their return, he walked slowly back under the windows flaring in the sunset.“Truly,” he said, “the world is with the young men. There can be no pleasanter task for the middle-aged than to assist them, but, alas! we can teach them nothing, for, as the years go by, there is more and more to learn.”He sat up until half-past one with the chamber growing ever more chill and empty, and his heart sinking as he thought of accidents that might havebefallen them. He was asleep on their return and never knew its precise hour. They gave a perfectly frank and probable account of their doings: dinner at a grill-room, a music-hall, supper at a German restaurant, and then on to an At Home at the Schlegelmeiers’, where there had been a squash so thick that once you were in a room it was impossible to move to any of the others. They had been wedged into the gallery of the great drawing-room at Withington House, where the principal entertainment had been a Scotch comedian who chanted lilting ballads. It was this distinguished artist’s habit to make his audience sing the chorus of each song, and it had been diverting to see duchesses and ladies of high degree and political hostesses singing with the abandon of the gods at an outlying two-shows-a-night house:
Money poured in.
Five companies were sent out with “Lossie Loses” in America, three in England, and the play was given in Australia and South Africa. It was also published. Money poured in. It came in tens, in hundreds, in thousands of pounds. It became a purely automatic process, and Old Mole quickly lost interest in it and ceased to think about it. He told himself that it would soon come to an end, that sucha violent eruption of gold could not last very long, and his attention was engrossed by its effects.
In his own mind it had brought about no moral crisis like that of his first catastrophe, but, insensibly, it had altered his point of view, given him a sense of security that was almost paralyzing in its comfort. All his old thoughts had been in self-protection against the people with whom he had come in contact, people to whom he was a stranger, different from themselves, and therefore suspect. But now in London when he met new people they bowed before him, put themselves out to ingratiate him, almost, it seemed, though he hated to think so, to placate him. His name was known. He was Mr. Beenham, and was somehow responsible for “Lossie Loses,” which everybody had seen and the public so loved that three matinées a week were necessary, and there were beginning to be Lossie collars and Lossie hats and Lossie muffs and Lossie biscuits and Lossie corsets. . . . And his sister had called on Matilda and removed that source of bitterness. And at the club men sought his acquaintance. He had letters from more than one of his old colleagues at Thrigsby and several of his former pupils sought him out. A few of them were distinguished men—a doctor, a barrister, a journalist, the editor of a weekly literary review. They invited him to their houses, and he was delighted with the ease and grace with which Matilda bore herself and was more than a match for their wives, and became friendly with one or two of them. Theymoved among people whose lives were easy and smooth-running in roomy, solidly furnished houses, all very much like each other in style and taste. The people they met at these houses in South Kensington and Hampstead were almost monotonously alike. At the doctor’s house they met doctors, at the barrister’s solicitors and more barristers, at the editor’s journalists and writers. They were different only in their professions: those apart, they were as alike as fossil ammonites in different strata: and they all “loved” “Lossie Loses.” The women were very kind to Matilda and invited her to their tea parties and “hen” luncheons. She read the books they read and began to have “views” and opinions, and to know the names of the twentieth century poets; she picked up a smattering of the jargon of painting and music just as she caught the trick of being smart in her dress, and for the same reason, because the other women had “views” and opinions and talked of music and painting and were smart in their dress. The eruption of gold into their lives had blown her desire to return to the theater into the air. She was fully occupied with dressing, buying clothes, ever more clothes, and arranging for the hospitality they received and gave.
Her husband was amazed at the change in her. It was as startling as the swift growth of a floundering puppy into a recognizable dog. It was not merely a matter of pinning on clothes and opinions and a set of fashionable ideas: there was real growth in the woman which enabled her to wearthese gewgaws with ease and grace so that they became her and were an ornament, absurd it is true, but so generally worn—though rarely with such tact—that their preposterousness was never noticed in the crowd. She was gayer and easier, and she seemed to have lost the tug and strain at her heart. Often in the daytime she was dull and listless, but she never failed to draw upon some mysterious reserve of vitality for the evening.
He was sometimes alarmed when he watched the other women who had not her freshness, and saw how some of them had ceased to be anything but views and opinions and clothes. But he told himself that she was not tied, as the rest were, by their husband’s professions, to London, and that they could always go away when they were tired of it. . . . He was often bored and exhausted, but he put up with it all, partly because of the pleasure she was finding in that society, and partly because he felt that he was getting nearer that indeterminate but magnetically irresistible goal which had been set before him on—when was it?—on the night when his thoughts had taken form and life and he had been launched into that waking dreamland. With that, even the most violent happenings seemed to have very little to do; they were almost purely external. One might have a startling adventure every day, and be no nearer the goal. One might have so many adventures that his capacity to enjoy them would be exhausted. There was, he felt sure, as he pondered the existence of these professional peopleand saw how many of them were jaded by habit, but were carried on by the impetus of the habits of their kind, so that they were forever seeking to crowd into their days and nights far more people, thoughts, ideas, books, æsthetic emotions than they would hold—there was somewhere in experience a point at which living overflowed into life and was therein justified. So much seemed clear, and it was that point that he was seeking. In his relationship with Matilda, in his love for her, he had striven to force his way to it. The violence of his meeting with her, the brutality of his breach with his old existence, had, by reflex action, led him to violence and brutality even in his kindness, even in his attempted sympathy.
That seemed sound reasoning, and it led him to the knowledge that Matilda had plunged into the life of the professional people with its round of pleasures and functions, its absorption in tailors and mummers and the amusers of the people, its entire devotion to amusement, as a protection against himself. It was an unpleasant realization, but amid so much pleasantness it was bracing.
Money poured in. “Lossie Loses” was visited by all the Royal Family. When it had been performed two hundred and fifty times the Birthday Honors list was published and Henry Butcher was acclaimed “our latest theatrical knight.” He gave a supper party on the stage to celebrate the two occasions; and he invited Mr. and Mrs. Beenham.
There were present the Solicitor-General, Mr. Justice Sloppy, the three celebrated daughters of two dukes, the daughters-in-law of three Cabinet Ministers, a millionaire, two novelists, five “absolutely established” dramatists, three dramatic critics, nine theatrical knights, the ten most beautiful women in London, the Keeper of the Coptic Section of the South Kensington Museum, Tipton Mudde, the aviator, and Archdeacon Froude, the Chaplain of the Actors’ Union. There were others who were neither named nor catalogued in the newspaper (Court and Society) next day. As Mr. Justice Sloppy said, in the speech of the evening: “For brains and beauty he had never seen anything like it. . . .” The toasts were the King, Sir Henry Butcher, Lossie, and the Public, and there, as Panoukian remarked when the feast was described to him, you have the whole thing in a nutshell, the topnotch of English philosophy, the expression of the English ideal, lots of food, lots of drink, lots of talk, of money, of people, and then a swollen gratitude—“God bless us every one.” And Panoukian then developed a theory that England, the English character, had reached its zenith and come to flower and fruit in the genius of Charles Dickens. Thereafter was nothing but the fading of leaves, the falling of leaves, the drowsing into hibernation. He was excited by the idea of falling leaves to describe the intellectual and moral activity of the country. It would seem to explain the extraordinary predominance of the Harbottles, who were so thick uponevery English institution that Vallombrosa was nothing to it.
Old Mole met Tyler Harbottle again, and, allowing for Panoukian’s youthful exaggeration, had to admit the justice of his estimate. Harbottle was very like a falling leaf, blown hither and thither upon every gust of wind, dropping, skimming, spinning in the air, but all the time obeying only one impulse, the law of gravity, which sent him down to the level of the ground, the public. Seeing nothing but the public, nothing beyond it, hoping for nothing but a comfortable resting place when at last he came to earth, Harbottle was under the illusion that the winds that tossed him came from the public, and when they blew him one way he said, “I will go that way,” and when they blew him another he said, “I will go this.” He was a Unionist Free Trader in theory and by label: in practice he was an indefatigable wirepuller. By himself he was unimportant, but there were so many of him and his kind that he had to be placated.
Old Mole met all the Harbottles. After Sir Henry Butcher’s party he and Matilda were squeezed up into a higher stratum of society. Tipton Mudde took Matilda up in his monoplane and thereafter their whole existence grew wings and flew. They now met the people of whom their professional acquaintances had talked. The triumph of “Lossie Loses” continued: it was said the play would beat the record of “Our Boys.” Money poured in, and almost as bewildering was the number ofinvitations—to vast dinner parties, to at homes, to drawing-room meetings, to boxes at the Opera, to luncheons at the luxurious hotels, to balls, to political receptions, to banquets given to celebrate honors won or to mark the end of a political campaign, or to welcome an actor-manager home from Australia. Whenever a Harbottle pulled out a plum from the pie than the subtler Harbottles buzzed like flies around it and arranged to eat and drink and make merry or at least to make speeches.
For a time it was very good fun. Old Mole and Matilda did as the Harbottles did. They had so many engagements that they were compelled to buy a motorcar and to engage a chauffeur. Without it Matilda could never have found time to buy her clothes. She went to the dressmaker patronized by all the female Harbottles, but the dressmaker made for an old-fashioned duchess, who adhered to the figure of the nineties and refused to be straight-fronted. The female Harbottles fled from this horrid retrogression and made the fortune of an obscure little man in Chelsea.
It was good fun for a time, and Old Mole was really interested. Here on the top of English life, its head and front—for the great-leisured governing classes no longer governed; they had feudal possessions but not the feudal political power—was a little world whizzing like a zoetrope. You might peep through the chinks and the figures inside it would seem to be alive, but when you were inside it there were just a number of repetitions of the samefigures in poses disintegrated from movement. The machine whizzed round, but what was the force that moved it? Impossible to enter it except by energy or some fluke that made you rich enough or famous enough for there to be flattery in your acquaintance. True, Old Mole only saw the figures inside the machine arranged for pleasure. They were workers, too, but their pleasure was a part of their work. Lawyers who were working eighteen hours a day could find time to visit three great entertainments in an evening; politicians after an all-night sitting in the House could dine out, see two acts of the Opera, or the ballet, or an hour or so of a revue, and then return to the division Lobbies; actors, after two performances in the day, could come on to a reception at midnight and eat caviare and drink champagne. There were very few of whom it could be said that the rout was the breath of their nostrils; but all continued in it, all accepted it as a normal condition of things, as the proper expression of the nation’s finest energies. Impossible to avoid it, furtherance of ambition and young devotion to an ideal both led to it. . . . Pitchforked into it so suddenly, with so many vivid impressions after wanderings, Old Mole felt how completely it was cut off from the life of the country, because from the inside and the outside of the machine things looked so entirely different. He had to go no further than his own case. On all hands he heard it said so often that “Lossie Loses” was a wonderful play—“so delicate, so fanciful, so full of the poetry of common things”—that itneeded only a very little weakening of his critical faculty for him to begin to believe it and greedily to accept the position it had given him. As it was, knowing its intrinsic falsehood and baseness, he marveled that people of so much intelligence could be bemused by success into such jockeying of their standards. But he began to perceive that there were no standards, neither of life nor of art. There could not be, for there was no time for valuation, just as there was no time for thinking. Here and there he found an ideal or two, but such wee, worn, weary little things, so long bandied about among brains that could not understand them and worried into a decline by the shoddy rhetorical company they had been forced to keep. Arguing from his own case, Old Mole came to the conclusion that the whole whirligig had come about from a constant succession of decent ordinary mortals having been, like himself, the victims of an eruption of gold which had carried them, without sufficient struggle or testing of imagination or moral quality, to an eminence above their fellows, upon which, in their bewilderment, they were conscious of nothing but a dread of falling down. In that dread, sharing no other emotion, they clung together fearfully, met superficially, were never content unless they were meeting superficially, creating flattery and even more flattery to cover their dread. And, as they were forever gazing downward into the depths from which they had been raised, it was impossible for them to see more than a yard or so further than their own feet. Fearfulof taking a false step, they never moved; their minds curled up and went to sleep. They could create nothing, and could only imitate and reproduce. They had abandoned the dull habits of the middle class and yet were the slaves of middle-class ideas. There were very charming people among them, but they accepted good-humoredly that England had nothing better to offer. They had pleasant houses in Town and in the country, delightful and amusing people to visit them, to keep them from boredom, and they asked no more.
Old Mole studied the history of England, the railway frenzy, the growth of the manufacturing districts, the foundation of the great shipbuilding yards, the immense eruption of gold that had swept away the old, careless, negligent, ruling squires, and set in their place those who could survive the scramble. And the scramble had never ceased; it had been accepted as the normal state of things. The heat and excitement of the rout gave the illusion of energy, which, being without moral direction, was pounced upon by the English desire for comfort and the appearance of solidarity, the mania for having the best of everything in the belief that it will never be bettered. So against the inconveniences of an antiquated system of laws, a mean and narrow code of morals, the consequences of their own reckless disregard of health in the building of the great cities of industry, in the payment of those who labored in them, they padded themselves in with comfort, more and more of it.
“Almost,” said Old Mole, “I am persuaded to become a Jew, to sweat the sweaters, pick the profits, rule the world in honor of the cynical Hebrew god who created it, and live in uneasy triumph in the domestic virtues and worship of the flesh uncrucified.”
Once you have been drawn into the machine it is very difficult to get out of it. Old Mole struggled, but money and invitations came pouring in. “Lossie Loses” survived two holiday seasons. During the second the actress who played Lossie went away on her vacation, and Matilda, urged on by Butcher, with whom she had become friendly, played the part, was successful, and gave the piece a new spurt of vitality. It was not a brilliant performance, but then a brilliant performance would have killed the play. The play needed charm, Matilda had it, and, by this time, among so many expertly charming women, she had learned how to manipulate it. Her appearance on the stage extended her popularity among her distinguished acquaintances, but subtly changed her status, and she had to learn how to defend herself. Her life became more exciting and she expanded in response to it. She distressed Old Mole by talking about her adventures, and he began to think it was really time to go.
They went abroad for several months, to Paris, Florence, Rome, Sicily, Algiers, but as they stayed in luxurious and expensive hotels they might almost as well have stayed in London. Old Mole discoverednothing except that the eruption of gold must have been universal and that the character of the English nation had found its most obvious expression in its stout, solid, permanent telegraph poles.
They returned to London, and Matilda accepted a small part in a new play by a famous dramatist, who had borrowed “Lossie” from the “greatest success of the century,” called her “Blendy,” and set her to leaven the mixture he had produced after the two years’ hard work fixed as the proper quantum by Henrik Ibsen.
More success.
And Old Mole, feeling that he was now beyond all hope of escape, since he was suffering from a noticeable fatty degeneration of the will, had argued with Matilda, but she had had her way, for he could find no rejoinder to her plea that it was “something to do.”
He refused to leave Gray’s Inn. She was tired of it; said the rooms were cramped, but he clung to it as an anchorage.
There was a steadying of their existence. She took her work seriously, and rested as much as possible during the day. In the evenings he missed her, and he detested having his dinner at half-past six. But the discomfort was a relief and gave him a much needed sharpening of the wits. Every night he met her at the theater and made more acquaintances in it. He applied his theory of the eruption of gold to them, and, studying them for that purpose, wasamazed to find how little different they were from Mr. Copas and the miserable John Lomas. Copas had been untouched by the eruption. These men, and particularly Henry Butcher and Matilda’s manager, were Copas varnished and polished. Beneath the varnish they were exactly the same; self-important, self-centered, entirely oblivious of life outside the theater, utterly unheeding of everything outside their profession that could not be translated into its cant and jargon, childishly jealous, greedy of applause, sensitive of opinion, boys with the appetites and desires of grown men, human beings whose development had been arrested, who, in a healthy society, would be rogues and vagabonds, or wandering adventurers, from sheer inability to accept the restrictions and discipline imposed by social responsibility. They were cruelly placed, for they were in a position needing adult powers, having audiences night after night vaster than could be gathered for any divine or politician or demagogue; they had to win their own audiences, for no theater was subsidized; and when they had won them they were mulcted in enormous sums for rent; they were sucked, like the other victims of the eruption, into the machine, the zoetrope, and being there, in that trap and lethal chamber of spontaneity, they had to charm their audiences, with nothing more than the half-ideas, the sentimental conventions, the clipped emotions of their fellow sufferers. They were squeezed out of their own natures, forced into new skins, could only retain their positions by the successfulpractice of their profession, and were forced to produce plays and shows out of nothing, being robbed both of their Copas-like delight in their work and of their material for it. Their position was calamitous and must have been intolerable without the full measure of applause and flattery bestowed on them.
Clearly it was not through the theater that Old Mole could find the outlet he was seeking.
He turned wearily from its staleness, and told himself, after long pondering of the problem, that he had been mistaken, that he had been foolishly, and a little arrogantly, seeking in life the imaginative force, the mastery of ideas and human thoughts and feelings that he had found in literature. Life, maybe, proceeds through eruption and epidemic; art through human understanding and sympathy and will. . . . That pleased him as a definite result, but at once he was offended by the separation, yet, amid so much confusion, it was difficult to resist the appeal of so clean and sharp a conception. It lost the clarity of its outline when he set it against his earlier idea of living brimming over into life. . . . There were then three things, living, life and art, a Trinity, three lakes fed by the same river. That was large and poetic, but surely inaccurate. For, in that order, the lakes must be fed by a strange river that flowed upward. . . . Anyhow, it was something to have established the three things which could comprise everything that had penetrated his own consciousness, three things which were of the same essence,expressions of the same force. Within the action and interaction there seemed to be room for everything, even for Sir Henry Butcher, even for Tyler Harbottle, M.P.
He had arrived at the sort of indolent charity which, in the machine, passes for wisdom and sanity, the unimaginative tolerance which furs and clogs all the workings of a man’s mind and heart. It is not far removed from indifference. . . . In his weariness, the exhaustion and satiety of the modern world, he measured his wisdom by the folly of others, and in his satisfaction at the discrepancy found conceit and thought it confidence. He began to write again and returned to his projected essay on Woman, believing that he had in his idea disentangled the species from Matilda. He was convinced that he had risen above his love for her, to the immense profit of their relationship, which had become more solid, settled and pleasurable. As he had planned when they came to London, so it had happened. They had gone their ways, seemed for a time to lose sight of each other, met again, and were now—were they not?—journeying on apace along life’s highway, hailing the travelers by the road, aiding the weary, cracking a joke and a yarn with those of good cheer, staying in pleasant inns.
“Something like a marriage!” thought he. “Life’s fullest adventure.”
And he measured his marriage against those of the men and women in the machine; sour captivityfor the most part, or a shallow, prattling and ostentatious devotion.
His essay on Woman was only a self-satisfied description of his marriage. Out of the writing of it came no profit except to his vanity. Preoccupied with questions of style, he pruned and pared it down, refashioned and remodeled it until at last he could not read it himself. Having no convenient sands in which to bury it, he gave it to Panoukian to read.
Panoukian was in that stage of development (which has nothing to do with age) when a man needs to find his fellows worshipful and looks for wonders from them. He was very young, and kindness from a man older than himself could bowl him over completely, set his affections frothing and babbling over his judgment, so that he became enslaved and sycophantish, and prepared, mentally if not physically, to stand on his head if it so happened that the object of his admiration could be served by it. He was in a nervous state of flux, possessing small mastery over his faculties, many of which were only in bud; his life was so little his own, was so shapeless and unformed that there could be no moderation in him; his admirations were excessive, had more than once landed him in the mire, so that he was a little afraid of them, and to guard against these dangers sought refuge in intolerance. To prevent himself seeing beauty and nobility and being intoxicated by them, he created bugbears for himself and hated them, and was forever tracking them down and finding their marks in the mootinnocent persons and places. He was very young, mightily in love with love, so that he was forever guarding himself from coming to it too early and being fobbed off with love cheapened or soiled. His passion was for “reality,” of which he had only the most shapeless and uncommunicable conception, but he was always talking about it with fierce denunciations of all the people who seemed to him to be deliberately, with criminal folly, burking it. For this reality his instinct was to preserve himself, and he lived in terror of his loneliness driving him to headlong falls from which he might never be able to recover. He was a full-blooded, healthy young man and must have been wretchedly unhappy had it not been that people, in their indolent, careless way, were often enough kind to him to draw off some of his accumulated enthusiasm in an explosive admiration and effusive, though tactfully manipulated, affection. Old Mole was kinder to him than anyone had ever been except his father, but then his father had had no other methods than those of common sense, while in Old Mole there was a subtlety always surprising and refreshing. Also Old Mole was prepared almost indefinitely, as it seemed, to listen to Panoukian’s views and opinions and rough winnowing of the wheat from the chaff of life, so far as he had experienced it.
Panoukian therefore read Old Mole’s manuscript with the fervor of a disciple, and found in it the heat and vigor which he himself always brought to their discussions. The essay, indeed, was likethe master’s talk, cool and deliberate, broken in its monotony by comical little stabs of malice. The writing was fastidious and competent. Panoukian thought the essay a masterpiece, and there crept a sort of reverence into his attitude toward its author. This was an easy transition, for he had never quite shaken off the rather frightened respect of the pupil for the schoolmaster. Then, to complete his infatuation, he contrasted Old Mole with his employer, Harbottle.
And Old Mole was fond of Panoukian. At first it was the sort of amused tenderness which it is impossible not to feel on the sight of a leggy colt in a field or a woolly kitten staggering after a ball. Then, by association and familiarity, it was enriched and became a thing as near friendship as there can be between men of widely different ages, between immaturity and ripeness. It saved the situation for both of them, the young man from his wildness, the older from the violent distortion of values which had become necessary if he were to move easily and comfortably in the swim. Above all, for Old Mole, it was amusing. For Panoukian nothing was amusing. In his intense longing for the “reality” of his dreams he hated amusement; he detested the vast expenditure of energy in the modern world on making existence charming and pleasant and comfortable, the elaborate ingenuity with which the facts of life were hidden and glossed over; he despised companionable books, and fantastical pictures and plays, luxurious entertainments, magazines filledwith advertisements and imbecile love-stories, kinematographs, spectacular football, could not understand how any man could devote his energies to the creation of them and retain his sincerity and honesty. He adored what he called the English genius, and was disappointed and hurt because the whole of English life was not a spontaneous expression of it, and he found one of his stock examples in architecture. He would storm and inveigh against the country because the English architectural tradition had been allowed to lapse away back in the dark ages of the nineteenth century. He had many other instances of the obscuring or sudden obliteration of the fairest tendencies of the English genius, and to their mutual satisfaction, Old Mole would put it all down to his theory of the eruption of gold.
Nearly all Panoukian’s leisure was spent at Gray’s Inn or out with Old Mole and Matilda, or with them on their visits to those of their friends to whom they had introduced him. He was good-looking, well built, easily adept at ball-games—for he possessed a quick, sure eye—and his shy frankness made him likeable. The charm of English country life would soften his violence and soothe his prejudices, but only the more, when he returned to London, would he chafe against the incessant pursuit of material advantages, the mania of unselective acquisition, the spinning and droning of the many-colored humming-top.
From the first moment he had been Matilda’s slave, and no trouble was too great, no time toolong, no task too tedious, if only he could yield her some small service. He would praise her to Old Mole:
“She is so real. Compare her with other women. She does all the things they do, and does them better. She takes them in her stride. She can laugh with you, talk with you, understand what you mean better than you do yourself, give you just the little encouragement you need, and you can talk to her and forget that she is a woman. . . . You don’t know, sir, what an extraordinary difference it has made in my life since I have known you two.”
That would embarrass Old Mole, and he found it impossible to say anything without jarring Panoukian’s feelings. Therefore he would say nothing, and later he would look at Matilda, watch her, wait for her smile, and wonder. Her smile was the most surprising, the most intimate gift he ever had from her. Often for days together they would hardly see each other and, when they met, would have little to say, but he would watch until he could meet her gaze, win a smile from her, and feel her friendliness, her interest, and know that they still had much to share and were still profoundly aware of each other. He would say to her sometimes:
“I don’t see much of you nowadays.”
She would answer:
“But you are so interested in so many things. And I like my life.”
And in the gentle gravity with which she now spoke to him, which was in every gesture of herattitude toward him, he would discern a fuller grace than any he had hoped to find in her. She was so trim and neat, so well disciplined, so delicate and nice in all she did; restrained and subtle but with no loss of force. Even her follies, the absurd modish tricks she had caught in the theater and among the women who fawned on her, seemed no impediment to her impulse should the moment come for yielding to it. She was no more spendthrift of emotion and affection than she was of money, and, almost, he thought, too thorough in her self-effacement and endeavor to be no kind of burden upon him.
“I am so proud of you!” he would say.
And she would smile and answer:
“You don’t know, you never will know, how grateful I am to you.”
But her eyes would gaze far beyond him, through him, and light up wistfully, and he would have a queer discomfortable sensation of being a sojourner in his own house. Then he would think and puzzle over Panoukian’s rapturous description of her. She was discreet and guarded: only her smile was intimate; her thoughts, if she had thoughts, were shy and never sought out his; demonstrative she never was. She led a busy, active life, the normal existence of moneyed or successful women in London, and she was distinguished in her efficiency. She had learned and developed taste, and was ever transforming the chambers in Gray’s Inn, driving out Robert and installing in every corner of it theexpression of her own personality. After the first dazzling discovery of the possibilities of clothes she had rebelled against the price charged by the fashionable dressmakers and made her own gowns. Robert used to twit her about her restlessness, and declared that one week when he came he would find her wearing the curtains, and the next her gown would be covering the cushions. Old Mole used to tease her, too, but what she would take quite amiably from Robert she could not endure from him.
“I thought you’d like it,” she would say.
“But, my dear, I do like it!”
“Then why do you make fun of me?”
And sometimes there would be tears. Once it came to a quarrel, and after they had made it up she said she wanted a change, and went off to stay with Bertha Boothroyd. In two days she was back again with the most maliciously funny description of Jim’s reception of her and his absolute refusal to leave her alone with Bertha lest she should be contaminated. Then she was gay and light-hearted, glad to be back again and more busy than ever, and when Panoukian came to see them she teased him out of his solemnity and earnestness almost into tears of rage. She told him he ought to go to Thrigsby and work, find some real work to do and not loaf about in London, in blue socks and white spats, waiting until he was old enough to be taken seriously.
He went away in the depths of misery, and she said to Old Mole:
“Why don’t you find him something to do?”
“I? How can I find him. . . ?”
“Don’t you know that you are a very important person? You know everybody who is anybody, and there is nobody you can’t know if you want to. Think of the hundreds of men in London who spend their whole lives struggling to pull themselves up into your position so that in the end they may have the pleasure of jobbing some one into a billet.”
“That,” said Old Mole, “is what Panoukian calls Harbottling.”
She made him promise to think it over, and he began to dream of a career for Panoukian, a real career on the lines of Self-Help.
In his original pedagogic relation with Panoukian he had blocked out for him an ascent upon well-marked and worn steps through Oxford into the Home Civil Service, wherein by the proper gradations he should rise to be a Permanent Under-Secretary and a Knight, and a credit to the school. To the altered Panoukian and to Old Mole’s changed and changing mind that ambitious flight was now inadequate. Panoukian was undoubtedly intelligent. Old Mole had not yet discovered the idea that could baffle him, and he was positively reckless in his readiness to discard those which neither fitted into the philosophy he for the moment held nor seemed to lead to a further philosophy at which he hoped to arrive. Every day Panoukian became more youthful and every day more breathlessly irreverent. Nothing was sacred to him: he insisted on selectinghis own great men, and Old Mole was forced to admit that there was some wisdom in his choice. He read Voltaire and hated organized religion; Nietzsche and detested the slothfulness and mean egoism of the disordered collection of human lives called democracy; Butler and quizzed at the most respected and dozing of English institutions; Dostoevsky and yearned out in a thinly passionate sympathy to the suffering and the diseased and the victims of grinding poverty. He was not altogether the slave of his great men: after all they were dead; life went on and did not repeat itself, and he (Panoukian) was in the thick of it, and determined not to be crushed by it into a cushioned ease or the sodden insensibility of too great misery.
“My problem,” he would say, “is myself. My only possible and valid contribution to any general problem is the effective solution of that. In other words, can I or can I not become a human being? If I succeed I help things on by that much; if I fail, I become a Harbottle and retard things by that much. Do you follow me?”
Old Mole was not at all sure that he did, but he found Panoukian refreshing, for there was in him something both to touch the affections and excite the mind, and in his immediate surroundings there was very little to do as much. There were men who talked, men who did little or nothing else; but they lacked warmth, they were Laputans living on a floating island above a land desolate in the midst of plenty. Among such men it was difficult to conceiveof Panoukian finding a profitable occupation. Take him out of politics, and where could he be placed? For what had his education fitted him? Panoukian had had every kind of education. He had begun life in an elementary school, passed on by his own cleverness to a secondary school, and from that to the university where contact with the ancient traditions of English culture, manhood and citizenship had flung him into revolt and set him thinking about life before he had lived, braying about among philosophies before he had need of any. There was a fine stew in his brain, a tremendous array of ideas beleaguering Panoukian without there being any actual definite Panoukian to beleaguer. Certainly Old Mole could not remember ever having been in such a state himself, nor in any generation subsequent to his own could he remember symptoms which could account for the phenomenon. He had to look far to discover other Panoukians. They were everywhere, male and female. He set himself to discover them; they were in journalism, in science, in the schools of art, on the stage, writing wonderfully bad books, producing mannered and deliberately ugly verse, quarreling among themselves, wrangling, detesting each other, impatient, intolerant, outraging convention and their affectionate and well-meaning parents and guardians, united only in the one savage determination not to lick the boots of the generation that preceded them. When they could admire they worshiped; they needed to admire; they wanted to admire all men,and those men whom they found unadmirable they hated.
It was all very well (thought Old Mole) for Matilda with her cool common sense to say that Panoukian must do something. What could he do? His only positive idea seemed to be that he would not become a Harbottle; and how better could he set about that than by living among the species with the bitterness of his hatred sinking so deep into his soul that in the end it must become sweetness? In theory Panoukian was reckless and violent; in practice he was affectionate and generous, much too full of the spasmodic, shy kindness of the young to fit into the Self-Help tradition. Indeed, it was just here that the Panoukians, male and female, were so astonishing. For generations in England personal ambition had been the only motive force, the sole measure of virtue, and it was personal ambition that they utterly ignored. They were truly innocent of it. Upon that axis the society in which they were born revolved. They could not move with it, for it seemed to them stationary, and it was abhorrent to them. Their thoughts were not the thoughts of the people around them. They could neither speak the old language nor invent a new speech in which to make themselves understood. Virtue they could perceive in their young hunger for life, but virtue qualified by personal ambition and subserving it they could not understand. They were asking for bread and always they were offered stones. . . . Old Mole could not see what better he could do than be kindto Panoukian, defend him from his solitude and give him the use of the advantages in the “swim” of London which he had no mind himself to employ.
One of the few definite and tangible planks in Panoukian’s program was a stubborn conviction that he must have an “idea” of everything. It was, he insisted, abominable to live in London unless there was in his mind a real conception of London.
“You see,” he would say, “it would be charming and pleasant to accept London as consisting of the Temple, the House and Gray’s Inn, with an imperceptible thread of vitality other than my own to bind them together. We’ve had enough of trying to make life charming and pleasant. All that is just swinish rolling in the mud. Do you follow me? We’ve had enough. We were begotten and conceived and born in the mud, and we’ve got to get out of it; and, unless you see that mud is mud, you can’t see the hills beyond, and the clear rivers, and the sky. Can you?”
“No, you can’t,” said Old Mole, groping about in his incoherence, and speaking only because Panoukian was waiting for a shove into his further speculations.
“I mean, London may be all in a mess, which it is, but if I haven’t a clear idea of the mess I can’t begin to mop it up, and I can’t begin on it at all until I’ve cleaned up the bit of the mess that is in myself, can I? I mean, take marriage, for instance.”
“By all means, take marriage.”
“Well, you’re married and I’m not, but it isn’t a bit of good screaming about marriage unless your own marriage is straightened out and,—you know what I mean?—understood, is it? . . .”
So he would go on, whirling from one topic to another—marriage, morals, democracy, the will to power,—thinking in sharp contrasts, sometimes hardly thinking, but feeling always. Vaguely, without objects, catching himself out in some detestable sentimentality, admitting it frankly and going back again over his whole argument to pluck it out. Panoukian was to himself a weedy field, and with bowed back and stiffened loins he was engrossed in stubbing it. It was exhausting to watch him at it, and when, as sometimes happened, Old Mole saw things through Panoukian’s eyes he was disquieted. Then there seemed no security in existence; civilization was no longer an achievement, but a fluid stream flowing over a varied bed—rock, pebbles, mud, sand; society was no establishment, but a precarious, tottering thing, a tower of silted sands with an oozy base, blocking the river, squeezing it into a narrow and unpleasant channel. In the nature of things and its law the river would one day gather unto itself great waters and bear the sands away. . . . Meanwhile men strove to make the sand heap habitable, for they were born on it, lived and died on it, and never looked beyond. Their whole lives were filled with dread of its crumbling, their whole energies devoted to building up against it and against the action of wind and rain and sun. Theybuilt themselves in and looked not out, and made their laws by no authority but only by expediency. And the young men, in their vitality too great for such confinement, knew that somewhere there must be firm ground, and were determined to excavate and to explore. And Old Mole wished them well in the person of Panoukian.
That young man set himself to discover London. He was forever coming to Gray’s Inn with exciting tales of streets discovered down by the docks or in the great regions of the northern suburbs. He set himself to walk from end to end of it, from Ealing to West Ham, from Dulwich to Tottenham, and he vowed that there were men really living in it, and he began to think of the democracy as a real entity, to be exalted at the thought of its power. Old Mole demurred. The democracy had no power, since it knew not how to grasp it. Its only instrument was the vote, which was the engine of the Harbottles, the nibblers, the place-seekers, the pleasure-hunters, those who scrambled to the top of the sandy tower, where in the highest cavern there were at least air and light and only the faintest stench from the river’s mud. Here there was so much divergence between Old Mole and Panoukian that they ceased to talk the same language, and Old Mole would try another tack and reach the stop-gap conclusion that the difference came about from the fact that Gray’s Inn was very comfortable, while Panoukian’s chambers in the Temple were bleak and bare. Thatwas unsatisfactory, for Panoukian would inveigh against comfort and vow, as indeed was obvious, that no one had yet devised a profitable means of spending a private income of thirty thousand a year. After reading an economic treatise he came to the conclusion that the whole political problem resolved itself into the wages question. Old Mole hated problems and questions. They parched his imagination. His whole pleasure in Panoukian’s society lay in the young man’s power to flood ideas with his vitality. He argued on economic lines and gradually forced the young man up to the spiritual plane and then gave him his conception of society as a sand heap. That fired Panoukian. Was it or was it not necessary for human beings to live upon shifting ground, with no firm foothold? And he said that the great men had been those who had gone out into the world and brought back tales of the fair regions contained therein.
“They have dreamed of fair regions,” said Old Mole, “but no man has ever gone out to them.”
“Then,” said Panoukian, “it is quite time some one did.”
Matilda came in on that, caught the last words, and asked hopefully:
“What is it you are going to do?”
“He is going,” said Old Mole, “to discover the bedrock of life and live on it.”
“Is that all?” Matilda looked disappointed. “I hoped it was something practical at last.”
The two men tried to carry on the discussion, butshe closured it by saying that she wanted to be taken out to dinner and amused. Panoukian flew to dress himself in ordered black and white, and Matilda said to Old Mole:
“The trouble with you two is that you have too much money.”
“That, my dear, is the trouble with almost everybody, and, like everybody else, we sit on it and talk.”
“It would do you both a world of good to have some real hard, unpleasant work.”
“I can’t agree with you. For twenty-five years I had real, hard, unpleasant work five days in the week, and it profited neither myself nor anybody else. I went on with it because it seemed impossible to leave it. It left me, and my life has been a much brighter and healthier thing to me. Panoukian is young enough to talk himself into action. I shall go on talking forever.”
And he went on talking. Matilda produced a workbox and a pile of stockings and began darning them. They sat one on either side of the fireplace, and in the chimney sounded the explosive coo of a pigeon.
“My dear,” said Old Mole, “you know, I believe in Panoukian. I believe he will make something of himself. I fancy that when he is mature enough to know what he wants he will be absolutely ruthless in making for it.”
“Do you?”
Matilda rolled a pair of stockings up into a balland tossed them into a basket on the sofa some yards away. It was a neat shot, and Old Mole admired the gesture with which she made it, the fling of the arm, the swift turn of the wrist.
“I do,” he said. “Until then there can be no harm in his talking.”
“No. I suppose not. But you do go on so.”
Panoukian returned. Matilda made ready, and they set out. Old Mole took them up to the Holborn gate and watched them walk along toward Chancery Lane. It was a July evening. He watched them until they were swallowed up in the hurrying crowd, the young man tall and big, towering above Matilda small and neat. He saw one or two men in the street turn and look at her, at them perhaps, for they made a handsome couple. He admired them and was moved, and a mist covered his spectacles. He took them off and wiped them. Then, kindling to the thought of a quiet evening to end in the excitement of their return, he walked slowly back under the windows flaring in the sunset.
“Truly,” he said, “the world is with the young men. There can be no pleasanter task for the middle-aged than to assist them, but, alas! we can teach them nothing, for, as the years go by, there is more and more to learn.”
He sat up until half-past one with the chamber growing ever more chill and empty, and his heart sinking as he thought of accidents that might havebefallen them. He was asleep on their return and never knew its precise hour. They gave a perfectly frank and probable account of their doings: dinner at a grill-room, a music-hall, supper at a German restaurant, and then on to an At Home at the Schlegelmeiers’, where there had been a squash so thick that once you were in a room it was impossible to move to any of the others. They had been wedged into the gallery of the great drawing-room at Withington House, where the principal entertainment had been a Scotch comedian who chanted lilting ballads. It was this distinguished artist’s habit to make his audience sing the chorus of each song, and it had been diverting to see duchesses and ladies of high degree and political hostesses singing with the abandon of the gods at an outlying two-shows-a-night house: