Du bist wie eine Blume.So rein und schön und hold . . .Like nearly every lover who has any acquaintance with the German language, he had tagged Heine’s verses on to his beloved. He clutched at them now. They were still apt. He used them as a weapon with which to drive back the cause of morality, but he was still very far from the mastery of himself and the affair—l’affaire Panoukian.He was the victim of a fixed idea—the taxicab, the hotel door swinging round, the low-hanging clouds, the Nelson statue. . . . George II had caused the death of Königsmarck, but his sympathies had never been with George II; besides that was a monarch, and not even the success of “Lossie Loses” and his acquaintance with half the Cabinet would enable him with impunity to procure the death of Panoukian. Apart from the defence of honor and the cause of morality, what do men do in the circumstances?He was to receive instruction. . . .In the reading room he picked up an evening newspaper. It was pleasant to hold a tangible object in his fingers and to pass into the reporteddoings of the great and the underworld. He had heard gossip of the final catastrophe of a notoriously wretched marriage. The divorce proceedings were reported in the paper. The husband—Old Mole knew him slightly and did not like him—gave evidence to show himself as a noble and generous creature, near heartbroken, and the woman, whom his selfishness had driven into a desperate love, as light or hysterical. It was such a distortion of the known facts, such an audacious defiance of the knowledge common to all polite London, that Old Mole was staggered. He read the report again. One sentence of the evidence was almost a direct appeal for sympathy. Knowing the man, he could picture him standing there, keeping his halo under his coat-tails and donning it at the right moment. It was theatrical and very adroit.“Bah!” said Old Mole. “He is groveling to the public, sacrificing even his wife to the many headed.”And his sympathies were with the woman. At least she had shown courage, and the man had lied and asked for admiration for it: so honor was defended and the cause of morality served.A little knot of men in the room were discussing the case. Their sympathies were with the man.“If a woman did that to me,” said the nearest man, “I’d thrash her, I would. Thank God, I’m a bachelor.”“I don’t know what women are coming to,” said a fat little man, as cosily tucked into his chair as ahazel nut in its husk. “They seem to think they can do just as they please.”A tall thin man said:“It all began with the bicycle. Women have never been the same since bicycles came in.”“It wouldn’t have been so bad,” said the fat little man, “if they’d cut and run.”And Old Mole repeated that sentence to himself.“What I can’t understand is,” said the first speaker, who seemed the most indignant, “why he didn’t shut her up until she had come to her senses. After all, we are all human, and that is what I should have done. If women won’t regard the sacredness of the home, where are we?”“Surely,” said Old Mole, incensed into speaking, “it depends on the home.”“I beg your pardon, sir,” retorted the nearest man with some heat. “It does not. In these matters you can’t make exceptions. Home is home, and there is no getting away from it. If a woman grows sick of her home it is her own fault and she must stick to it, dree her own weird, as the Scotch say. Destroy the home and society falls to the ground.”And Old Mole, sharpened by argument, replied:“Society is no more permanent than any other institution. Its existence depends entirely on its power to adapt itself to life. It is certainly independent of the innumerable sentimental ideas with which men endeavor to plaster up the cracks in its walls, among which I must count that of home.”The three men gaped at him. He continued:“Home, I conceive, has a meaning for children. It is the place in which they grow up. We make homes for our young as the birds make nests for theirs. When the children go forth then the home is empty and is no longer home. Men are no longer patriarchs and no more do they gather the generations under one roof-tree. . . . In the case under discussion there were no children, therefore there was never a home to defend or regard as sacred. Man and woman alike had placed themselves in a false position. What further they had to suffer we do not know. We know that the man took refuge in the closest egoism, and the woman finally in the restless adventure of which we know no more than has been reported to a newspaper by a dull and mechanical shorthand writer. My own view is that, where there are no children, society at large is not interested. Society is only interested in any marriage in so far as it will provide children to ensure its continued existence. Once children are born it is interested to see that they are fed, clothed and educated. (How effectively our present society pursues that interest you may easily observe if you will visit East or South London.) Beyond that its interference, explicit or covert, seems to me to be an unwarrantable intrusion into the privacy of the human soul. No one of us here is in a position to judge of the affair which is the occasion of your argument, and . . . and . . . I beg your pardon for interfering with it.”He rose and passed out the room, leaving threevery surprised clubmen behind him. But none of them could be more surprised than himself: surprised and relieved he was. He had been sickened at the idea of a woman being delivered up to the chatter of idle tongues, and in the violence of his distress had come by an absolute certainty that any dignified issue to his present affection could only come through an unprejudiced and unsentimental consideration of the whole facts. It was not going to be easy; but, dear God, he wanted something difficult, something really worth doing to counteract his misery. When he thought of himself and the ache at his heart he was blinded with tears and could see the facts only from one angle—his own.Du bist wie eine Blume,So rein und schön und hold . . .Seen from that angle, Matilda was reduced in stature, distorted, ugly, mean. But he had loved her, loved her, and must still have the truth of her: more than ever before he needed to understand her. The beauty and delight and youth he had enjoyed in her must not go down in bitterness.One saying he took away with him from the club:“It wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d cut and run.”Perhaps, he thought to himself, they had “cut and run.” And for him it became worse, to think that she had gone, without a word, with never a complaint,just gone. He remembered the night when she had said she was miserable, when he had found her in her bed, after the play, with her room in a litter. And he fell to thinking of the trials he must have put upon her, probing for all the possible offences, secret, subtle, unsuspected, of body and soul that might be laid at his door. There were many that he could think of, but his darkest hours came then when he perceived the fine balance, the perilous poise of married life, the imperceptible dovetailing of interests and habits and humors, the regions beyond perception where souls meet. Its nice complications were almost terrifying: at thousands of points men and women might fail, offend each other, crush each other, destroy, never dreaming of the cause, never, at the time, marking the effect. For such an adventure there need be heroism: to break, when even failure and offence and mutual exasperation bind, strength and courage superhuman or despairing. And men judge! And condemn! They measure this subtlest and most searching relationship with opinions and dull compromise and rules.He was tortured with the thought of all the injuries he might have done her, and he invented more, invented burdens that he had never put upon her to account for her going away from him, with never a word. For three days he lived in this torment, winding about and about from general to particular and back again by the most circuitous route, aRundreisewith the current morality for Baedeker. And everynow and then the obsession would stab home to his heart—the hotel door swinging, the flat infidelity. Once, when the pain was so mortal that he could contain himself no longer, he wrote to her at the hotel. He posted the letter. That was on the second day. On the third he was in an agony. No answer came.On the fourth day a telegram arrived from the Sussex village and an hour later she, brown, healthy, with a grand swing in her walk, a new depth of bosom, a squarer carriage of the shoulders; a rich bloom on her. She kissed his cheek.He stared and stared at her. He looked for change in her.“You!”“Didn’t you get my telegram?”“Oh! yes.”“I’ll take my things off, and we’ll have some tea.”She left him. He stood at the head of the little stairs leading down to her apartments, and he trembled and was near weeping. In her room he could hear her singing to herself, happily, blithely as a bird, with a full note that caught at his heart. She seemed to sing no song, but a melody, young and joyous with a full summer gaiety. The sun shone through the staircase window upon his hand where he clutched the balustrade. He was gripping it so tight that the veins stood out and the skin on his knuckles was white. A tear fell on his hand and he looked down at it. It was a plump, podgy, puckered middle-aged hand.He whisked back into his room as he heard her door open.They had tea, and he could not take his eyes off her. She thought he looked ill and pulled down. On his desk she saw the pile of his papers.“You’ve been writing,” she said. “You’ve been overdoing it. It’s never safe to leave a man alone.”“Yes,” he replied. “I have written a good deal.”“Is it a story?”“No. Not exactly a story.”“Is it finished?”“No. I doubt if it will ever be finished now.”She began to talk of the theater. She had been wired for to resume her part, as her understudy was proving unsatisfactory. Further she had had two offers. One to appear in a new musical comedy, the other of a part in a play to be produced at a little “intellectual” theater for eight matinées. She felt inclined, she said, to accept both. It would mean very hard work, but it would be experience, and it was flattering to be noticed by the superior persons of the stage. And she asked his advice. He thought it might be too much for her to have so much rehearsing and to play in the evening as well. That she brushed aside. She was feeling splendid, strong enough to act a whole play.“You are becoming a regular Copas,” he said.She laughed; he, too, and they plunged into reminiscences of the old days.“I sometimes think,” he said, “that those were the happiest months of my life.”“Nonsense. There’s always more and more in front.”“For you.”She went off into peals of laughter, for she had just remembered the encounter with the prize-fighter. Her sturdy gaiety simply swept him off his feet, and he could only follow in the train of her mood. They made so merry that they lost count of the time, and she suddenly sprang to her feet with a cry and scurried away, dinnerless, not to be late at the theater.“I ought to have told her,” he said to himself. “I ought to have said: ‘I know.’ . . . But how fine she looked! How happy she must be!”Happy? There was something in her mood beyond happiness: a zestful strength, a windiness that seemed to blow through every cranny of her soul, whipping the blood in her veins, so that she could not pause for states and conditions of the spirit, nor check herself to avoid unhappiness in herself or others. She was like a ship in full sail, bending to the wind, skimming over tossing seas. She was gallant. She was what he had always hoped she might become. There was in her such a new flood of vitality that he felt ashamed at the thought of bidding her pause to submit to his inquisition. Impossible to check her flight, cruel suddenly to present her with the meanness of what she had done while she was still glowing with its splendor.He had caught something of her glow, and now he wrestled to break free of rules of conduct andmoral codes, and he began, at last, to consider his problem in terms of flesh and blood. There were three points of view to be mastered: three lives knotted together in a tangle and the weakest strand would be broken.He felt hopeful. There would be a fight for it, and to that he thrilled. He had the exaltation of one on the brink of great discovery.He went to fetch her from the theater. The stagedoor lay at the back in an alley joining two great thoroughfares. As he entered the alley from one end he saw Matilda and Panoukian leave by the other, and he had his arm in hers. Old Mole turned, with the fluttering sense of an escape, glad not to have met them. And when he had controlled himself he was amused to think that they could not have dreaded the encounter more than he.He took a long walk to delay his return, and when he reached the chambers they were in darkness. He crept softly down the little stairs and tried her door. It was locked.In a moment’s panic he thought that this time she had really “cut and run,” and he was almost stunned with his terror of it. It was too soon, too soon: it would be disastrous; he would be left without understanding, to the mercy of the obsession; he had not all the threads in his hands; until he had, it would be rash folly to snap. He stood against her door, with his ear to the panel, holding his breath, straining to hear. There were explosive noises inthe house. From the room he could catch nothing for them. Closer and closer he pressed to the door, his ear against the panel. He lurched and the panel creaked. Silence. He heard her stir in her bed.She was there! That was all he wanted to know. On tiptoe he crept away. . . . She was there! He would yet gather all the threads and then he or she would snap. One or other would be broken.What had he then? The evidence of his own eyes. Was that not enough? It was enough for prescribed remedies, to which he could not resort without revenge, for which he had not now the least desire. What his eyes had seen was so isolated, so severed from the rest of his life as to be monstrous and injurious. By itself it was damnable harlotry. (There was a sort of boyish satisfaction in fishing out the words of a grosser age with which to bespatter it and make it even more offensive to pure-mindedness.) But, as he loved the woman, it could not stand by itself. He was in it, too. Actions cannot be judged by themselves. There must have been an antecedent conspiracy of circumstance and fault to lead to such misdemeanor.With a tight control of himself he could now almost think of it without jealousy (hardly any of that was left but the quick, shallow jealousy of the brute), but he could not think of it without passion, and through that he could discern its inherent passion and, faintly, respond to it. That put an end to all mean suspicions of a conspiracy against himself, or of cowardly contriving to enjoy stolen fruitand leave no trace. . . . She had locked the door against him. So much was definite, and he had a sort of envying admiration for her that she could be precise while he was still floundering and groping for understanding. . . . Certainly he had never seen her so sure of herself.But then, if she were so sure, why did she not “cut and run.” Then it would not be so bad. For a flash he saw the thing with the eyes of a fat clubman; the passion in him ebbed and he lost grip, and blundered into a mist. A lunge forward cleared him. She was sure of herself, so sure that she was giving no thought to her position except as it immediately presented itself. The new factor in her life called for no change, and everything she had was enriched by it, her possessions, her work, even her domestic life. It must all seem to her clear gain, and therefore she was sure. She loved her love, and everything that had led to it, and therefore she was sure.From that flight upward Old Mole came to the sensation of falling. He was possessed by a prevision, felt that in a moment he would see all things plain, would know exactly what was going to happen. He strained forward, felt sleep overcoming him, struggled against it, and fell asleep.Then Matilda was busy all day rehearsing, and, during the little time he had with her, she talked the slang and gossip of the theater. Once she asked after the work, and he read a little of it to her, andshe liked it and he plucked up courage to go on with it. She laughed at his cuts at women and admitted that he had thrust home at more than one of her own foibles. He had written part of a chapter on theTheater as Education.She could make nothing of that. The theater to her was a place in which you played “parts,” sometimes good and sometimes bad, and you were always waiting for the supreme, all-conquering “part” to turn up. She did what she was asked to do to the very best of her ability; that was her work and she did not look beyond it. The flattering side of London, its pleasures, fashions and functions had fallen into the background and she gave it just the attention which her interest seemed to demand. It never struck her as strange that she should be given no more of a play than her own part to read, and if she had been given the play would probably not have read it. She learned her part, movements and gestures, cues during rehearsal, and never watched any scene in which she did not appear.By her part in the “intellectual” play she was mystified. None of her Copas or Butcher tricks were in the least suited to it. She had an enormous part to learn: all talk, gibes at marriage, and honor, and wealth, and domesticity, all the fetishes of the theater in which she was beginning to find her footing. The manager of the theater was his own producer; he had chosen her because she looked the part, “the rising temperament,” he called it, and he added to her bewilderment with the invention of elaborate detail to break the flood of talk, and, inthe absence of action, to bind the play together. Everyone in that theater spoke of the play with awe, so she concealed her perplexity and brought it to Old Mole.“There are no scenes in it,” she said. “No cues. Nothing you can take hold of. I say my lines: the other people in the play don’t seem to take any notice of them, but just go on talking. I suppose it’s very clever, but it isn’t acting. I don’t believe even my uncle could do anything with it.”He recommended her to read the play, and she procured a copy from the author. When she had read it she said:“I know why nothing happens in it. There isn’t a soul in it who cares about anybody else. It’s all teasing. They can’t do anything else because they don’t care. And they have nothing really to talk about, so I suppose that’s why they discuss the Poor Law Commission, and the Cat and Mouse Bill, and the Social Evil and all sorts of things I never heard of.”Old Mole read it, and found it clever, amusing, but sterilizing and exhausting, and, in its essence, he could not find that it was very different from “Lossie Loses” or the contrivances of the Butcher repertory. It was just as unimaginative. It had come into existence, not from any spiritual need, but entirely to rebut Butcherdom. Butcherdom shadowed it. The author in writing his play seemed first of all to have thought what would happen in a Butcher entertainment in order to decide on somethingdifferent. He had not moved from Butcher back to life, but had run from Butcher down a blind alley. And the result was an almost brilliant hotchpotch with a strong savor of hatred and contempt and the tartness of isolation. Contempt for Butcher might be its strongest motive, but alone it could not account for it. Old Mole sought loyally for the best, but could find nothing nobler than the desire for admiration. The author was not scrupulous, nor was he ingenious; his bait for reputation was the ancient and almost infallible trick of measuring his cleverness by the stupidity of others.It lacked theatrical effectiveness and therefore it was impossible to get its meaning or even a drift of it into Matilda’s head. She learned her lines like a parrot, delivered them like a parrot—(thoroughly to the satisfaction of the producer)—looked charming in her expensive gowns and attracted the notice of the critics. The author told an interviewer that his play was a masterpiece of its kind, and that Matilda was one of the most remarkable actresses on the English stage. The piece ran for its eight matinées and was then heard of no more, but to Old Mole it had much value. It set him wondering. The stage had nothing to show but the false emotions of Butcherdom and the absence of emotion of the “intellectuals.” The theater must express the life of the country or it could not continue to exist, as it indubitably did. There was always a new playhouse being built. Money was poured into the theater through the stagedoor and through the box-office,but its best efforts were shown in childish fancy. It was at its healthiest and least odiously pretentious in the presentation of melodrama, with its rigid and almost idiotic right and wrong, its stupid caricature of the workings of the human heart. If it had a tradition, melodrama was its only representative. The plays of Shakespeare were melodrama in the hands of a man of genius. Without genius the national drama was heavy and lumpish, stolidly clinging to unquestioned and untested values, looking for no higher rewards in life than riches and public esteem.It was astonishing to Old Mole that he could be so deeply interested in these things. He had expected to be absorbed in his sorrow and the problem of handling it. Then he found that he was testing the two theaters, the Butcherish and the “intellectual,” by the passion that had flamed into his heart through his love for Matilda at the moment when it had been outraged. In neither was there a spark to respond to his fire. The Butcher theater was a corpse; the intellectual theater that same corpse turned in its grave. And it amused him to imagine how his case would be handled in them; in the one it would be measured by rule of thumb—the eternal triangle, halo’d husband, weeping wife, discomfited lover, or, if violent effects were sought for, the woman damned to an unending fall, the two men stormily thanking their vain and shallow God they were rid of her; in the other it would be talked out of court, husband and wife would never rise above asnarl, and lover would go on talking; in both men and women would be cut and trimmed to fit in with a formula. In the one the equation would be worked out pat; in the other it would go sprawling on and on like the algebraic muddle of a flurried candidate in an examination who has omitted a symbol and gone on in desperate hope of a result.Old Mole had discarded formulæ. He was dealing with a thing that had happened. Judgment of it, he said, was futile. The issue of it depended not on himself alone. As its consequences unfolded themselves he must apply the test of passion, grasp and, so far as possible, understand, and let passion burn its way to an outlet.Familiarity with this mystery, straining on from day to day, soon made it possible for him to accept the surface happenings of life without resentment.For her part in the musical comedy Matilda took singing and dancing lessons, so that she was out all day and every day. She was to receive a salary twice as large as any she had yet earned, and would be financially independent even though she indulged her extravagance, than which nothing was less probable. In all the working side of her life he took a very comfortable pride. If she was not altogether his creation, at least he had helped her to shape herself, and it was a delight to see her character taking firm lines. And, as he watched her, he thought of the current sentimental prating of motherhood and its joys and its concomitant pity of mendebarred from them, the absurdity of the segregation of the sexes: as if love were not in its essence creative; as if it had not begun to create before it reached consciousness; as if men could only take the love of woman, as in a pitcher, to spill it on the ground; as if love were not always beyond giving and taking, reaching out and out to create, lifting half-formed creatures into Being. . . . By the side of the other two theaters the musical comedy stage seemed almost to shine in candor, and he was glad that Matilda—the Matilda of his creation—should pass into it to charm the chuckle-heads out of their dullness.She passed into it gleefully and he was able to separate her from that other Matilda in whom there was a passion at grips with his. He was certain now that it was passion and no vagary, for, day by day, under her working efficiency, she gained in force, and warmth and stature.For five weeks Panoukian had made no appearance in Gray’s Inn. Then one day he came with a fat Newfoundland puppy, a present for Matilda. She was out. Old Mole received him.“Hullo!”“How do! sir.”They stood looking at each other, Old Mole holding the door back, Panoukian hesitating on the threshold with the puppy in his arms.Old Mole thought:“I will speak to him. I will tell him what I think of him. I will make him feel what he is.”He said:“Come in.”“Are you alone?” asked Panoukian.“Yes. Come in.”They entered Old Mole’s study, Panoukian first.“She said she wanted a dog, so I brought her this.”Panoukian put the puppy on the floor, walked over to the cigarette box and helped himself.Old Mole opened his mouth to speak, but it was dry and he could make no sound. He ran his tongue over his lips. At last he shot out:“Panoukian!”Panoukian was pulling the puppy from under the bookcase. He turned and faced Old Mole with his schoolboy expression of wondering what now might be his guilt. He looked so young that none of the words with which Old Mole was preparing to crush him—scoundrel, traitor, villain, blackguard—was anything but inept. He was just engagingly, refreshingly young; younger than he had ever been, even as a boy. The discontent, the hardness and strain of revolt had faded from his eyes; they were clear and bright. He was as fresh as the morning. Plainly he had no thought beyond the puppy and the pleasure he had hoped to bring with it, and was startled by the harshness of the pedagogic note in Old Mole’s exclamation, startled into shyness.Old Mole’s determination crumbled away: his laudable resolve was whisked away from him. He excused himself with this:“I have no right to speak to him before I have come to an understanding with her.”There was embarrassment between them, the awkwardness of master and pupil. To bridge it he said:“It is a long time since you have been to see us.”Directly he had said it he knew that he had contributed to their deception, but while he was seeking a means of withdrawal Panoukian pounced on his opportunity and dragged their three-cornered relationship back to the old footing: and Old Mole could not altogether disguise his relief.“Yes,” he said. “I’ve been so busy. Old Harbottle is running a private ball, and there’s been a tremendous lot of work up and down the country.”“Up and down the country,” repeated Old Mole.“Yes. Harbottle’s beginning to listen to what I say. I’ve been giving him some telling questions lately, and he’s already cornered the Front Bench twice. . . . The old idiot is beginning to discover the uses of impersonal unpopularity as an instrument of success. He would never have taken the plunge by himself, and he’s very grateful to me.”“So you are beginning to do something?”“You can’t do much in politics. I used to think you could. You can’t do first-rate things, but I’m beginning to realize that it’s a second-rate job.” He grinned. “The odd thing is that, since I realized that, I’m getting quite to like old Harbottle. He’s second-rate. He doesn’t know it, of course, because he hasn’t the least notion of what a first-rateman is like. He is perfectly cast-iron second-rate. Most surprising of all is that I am beginning to see that every man has the right to be himself—subject, of course, to every other man’s right to kick him for it.”“Eh?”Old Mole was startled. Tolerance was the last thing he expected from Panoukian; it was entirely out of keeping with his boyishness. He waited for more, but nothing came; and this was the most astonishing of all, for there Panoukian sat, boyish, glistening with youth, enunciating a maxim of tolerance, and actually relishing silence. Panoukian, having nothing more to say, was content to say nothing! . . . It was too bad. Almost it seemed that he had gone through all his misery for nothing. He had striven to master his situation only at every turn to be met with the triumph of the unexpected. He had decided to start by seeing the affair from Matilda’s point of view and Panoukian’s, and now, ludicrously, maddeningly, they had both changed, and both, apparently, were being intent on showing an amicable front to him. They were—and he writhed at the thought—they were trying to spare his feelings.An admirable maxim that! Panoukian, of course, had every right to be Panoukian;ergo,if needs must, to change into another Panoukian. The young man’s placid, contented, comfortably absorbed silence was exasperating.“Panoukian!” said Old Mole.Panoukian groped out of his silence.“Yes, sir.”(Ludicrously boylike he looked, all wide-eyed, deliberate innocence.)“There is a passage in Montaigne which, I think, excellently illustrates the observation you made some time ago. It is over there at the end of the bookcase.”Panoukian rose and strolled over to the shelf indicated, his back toward Old Mole, who sprang to his feet, strode, breathing heavily, glared fixedly at the round apex of the angle of Panoukian and lunged out in a lusty kick. The young man pitched forward, righted himself, and swung round, with his hand soothing the coat-tail-covered portion of his body.“Why the Hell did you do that?” he grunted.“To illustrate your maxim,” said Old Mole, “and also to relieve my feelings.”“If you weren’t who you are and what you are,” retorted Panoukian sharply, “I should knock you down.”To that Old Mole could not find the apt reply, and once again, ruefully, he was forced to see that he had been betrayed into an absurdity. In that moment he hated Panoukian more than anyone he had ever known. He had been whirled by the unexpectedness of Panoukian into throwing away his one flawless weapon, his dignity, and without it he was powerless. Without it he could not even draw on the prescribed attitudes and remedies for gentlemenin his position. All the same he was thoroughly pleased to have caused Panoukian pain, and hoped he would be forced to take his meals from the mantelpiece for a day or two.They stood glaring at each other, both wondering what would happen next. Panoukian retired gracefully from the conflict by stooping to pick up the puppy. Old Mole snorted, grabbed his hat, and stumped away and out of the chamber.The callousness of Panoukian! The effrontery! That he should dare to show his face, and such an unabashed, innocent face! Where was that conscience which makes cowards of us all? . . . At any rate, thought Old Mole, after being kicked Panoukian would not venture to appear again. But was that so sure? Was it so certain that his unpremeditated act of violence would jolt Panoukian’s conscience into activity? Having swallowed the indignity of his position, would he not the more easily be able to digest affront and insult and humiliation? How if the kick had not settled the affair Panoukian?From his own uneasiness and almost shame Old Mole knew that it had not, that possibly it might have only the effect of crystallizing the change of relation between himself and Panoukian, of obliterating the tie of affection, of equalizing matters, of slackening the rein on Panoukian, of releasing him from every other claim upon his affection, except the violent outpouring of love which had swept him intodisregard for convention, and honor, and the cause of morality. If there be degradation in violence, it affects the kicker as well as the kicked. Old Mole found himself very near understanding Panoukian. Clearly he had come to the chambers on an impulse. Matilda had desired a dog, he had seen the very dog, and come racing with it. Encountering Old Mole for the first time since the eruption in their affairs, he had carried the scene through with an admirable candor. There was no shiftiness in him, nor slyness: that would have been horrible, the sure indication of a beastly intrigue. No: either Panoukian was so possessed by his emotions, by the joy of what was probably his first full affair of the heart, that he could give no thought either to his own position or Matilda’s or her husband’s; either that or he was so intent on his passion, so absorbed by it, as to be lifted beyond scruples or thought of impediment, and was tearing away like a bolting horse, regardless of the cart behind or the cart’s occupants. In either case Old Mole felt that he had something definite to deal with, genuine feeling and no farded copy of it. And he felt sorry for the kick and wished he could withdraw it.The very next day Panoukian came to dinner at half-past six. Matilda brought him. They had met by chance in the Strand, and she had persuaded him to come back with her.The meal was to all appearances like hundreds of others they three had had together. Old Mole sat at the head of the table, with Matilda on one sideof him, Panoukian on the other, and he watched them. They did not watch him. They grinned at each other like happy children, and made absurd jokes and teased, and their most ordinary remarks seemed to have a secret and profound meaning for them. Sometimes they explained their references to Old Mole, and then it was always “We”—Panoukian said: “We,” Matilda: “Arthur and I” . . . and beneath all their talk there seemed to be a game, but a game in all seriousness, of fitting their personalities together. Every now and then, when they were filled with a bubbling consciousness of their wealth, they would throw a scrap to Old Mole out of sheer lavishness and babyish generosity. But other thought for or of him they had obviously none. They were not embarrassed by his presence, nor, to his amazement, was he by theirs. Only he was distressed, when they threw him a scrap of their happiness, to find that he knew not what to do with it, and could only put it away for analysis.“I analyze and analyze,” he thought, “and there are they with the true gold in their hands, hardly knowing it for precious metal.”Oh, yes! They were in love, and they had no right to be in love, and it was his duty to put an end to it.But how?He could only say: “This woman is my wife. I forbid her to explore any region of life which I cannot enter. She has no entity apart from me; herpersonality can find no food except what I am able or choose to provide for her.”That was impossible, for it was not true.More humanly he might say:“I can understand that you love each other. But I cannot condone the selfishness it has led you to, or the secrecy. . . .”There he stopped. There was no secrecy. They were disguising nothing. They did not tell him because their intimacy was, as yet, so preciously private an affair that it could not bear talking of; and he bowed to that and respected their reticence.Matilda went to tidy her hair and he was left alone with Panoukian. They could find nothing to say to each other. The minds of both were full of the woman. Without her they fell apart, each into his separate world. And Old Mole knew that the issue of the adventure lay with her, and he knew that Panoukian looked for no issue and was living blindly in the present. He felt sorry for Panoukian.The evening papers were thrust through the door. Panoukian fetched them and gave them to his host. The largest event of the day was the grave illness of Sir Robert Wherry.“Dear, dear,” said Old Mole.“I shouldn’t have thought he was human enough to be ill,” said Panoukian.“It is ptomaine poisoning, set up by a surfeit of oysters.”“There’ll be a terrific funeral. He was thegreatest of Harbottlers. He loved the public and his love was requited.”And Old Mole thought of that other Harbottler who had so loved the public that he had trampled his wife in the mud to retain its esteem.Matilda returned:“Who’s coming to the theater with me?” she said, and her eyes lighted on Panoukian and she gave him a smile more profound, more subtle, more tenderly humorous than any she had ever bestowed on Old Mole. Both men rose. Old Mole reached the door first. With graceful generosity Panoukian bowed, yielded his claim, kissed Matilda’s hand, and took them to the door. Old Mole went first. Halfway down the stairs Matilda turned:“Oh! Arthur,” she said, “the puppy’s a perfect darling.”As coarse men take to drink, or philandering, or tobacco, to relieve the strain of existence, so Old Mole took to work. His “Out of Bounds” (Liebermann, pp. 453, 7s.6d.net) is a long book, but it was written, revised, corrected in proof and published within six months. It was boomed, and lay, unread, on every one’s drawing-room table. He received letters about it from many interesting personages, and from his sickbed Robert Wherry gave it his pontifical blessing. The Secretary of State for Education asked Old Mole to dinner, and declared sympathy with the criticism of the prevailing system, but shook his head dubiously over the probabilityof his department taking any intelligent interest in it.“I quite agree,” he said, “that you ought to get at children through their imaginations, but imagination isn’t exactly a conspicuous quality of government departments.”“Then I don’t see how you can govern,” said Old Mole.“We don’t,” said the Secretary of State. “We take orders, like everybody else, but we are in a position to pretend that we are giving them. A government department is a great wheel going round very, very slowly, shedding regulations upon the place beneath. Every now and then, when none of the permanent officials is looking, an intelligent man can slip a real provision into the feeder and trust to luck for its finding the right need and the right place. . . . But it is not often we have the advantage of such thoroughly informed criticism, Mr. Beenham. The country is lamentably little interested in education, considering how much it has suffered from it.”“I have suffered from it.”He was amused by his celebrity. Every little group had a cast for him, but none of their bait attracted him in the least. He preferred to swim in his own waters, leisurely, painfully in the wake of Panoukian and Matilda. They at least knew where they were going, were possessed by an immediate object. Where all the politicians and scribes werelooking away from their own lives toward a reorganized society based on a change in humanity, a change not in degree but in kind, Panoukian and Matilda were changing, growing, responding to natural necessity. They were loving, loving themselves, loving life, their bodies, their minds, everything that body and mind could apprehend.“There is no social problem,” said Old Mole, “there is only the moral problem, and that is settled by the act of living, or left in a greater tangle by the refusal to live.”One night as he returned home from a dinner at a literary and artistic club he stood at the head of the little stairs looking down into the darkness. He was filled with regret for the past that had contained so much pleasantness and appalled by the vision of the future stretching on without Matilda, for it would be without her though she stayed under his roof. Between the theater and the other she gave so much that she had very little left for him—so little: gentleness and kindness and consideration, things which it were almost kinder not to give. It were best, he thought, that she should go and make her own life, with or without the other. She had her career, her work: friends she would always make, acquaintances she could always have in abundance. . . . And yet she stayed. He had felt dependent on her for the solution, for the proof, as it were, that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. But she stayed. There must then besomething that she treasured in her life with him. . . . And he was curious to know what it might be. Almost before he was aware of it he was down the little stairs and at her door, listening, and he was chilled with pity. She was weeping, and smothering the sound of it.“Poor child!” he thought.And he tapped lightly at her door. No sound. Again he tapped. She came then.“I heard you,” he said. “It was more than I could bear.”She led him into her room and made him sit on her bed as she slithered into it again. She would not have the light turned on.“I couldn’t bear you to be unhappy. You have been so happy.”“Yes,” she said.“Do you want to go?” he asked.“I’m afraid.”At first he thought she meant she was afraid of the tongues of the many, but that fear could be no more than superficial. Hers was deep. It seemed to shake her as an angry wind a tree.“Well, well,” he said.She reached out in the darkness for his hand. In silence she pressed his hand, and then:“You never know,” she said.It was all she could tell him, that she was suffering. He said:“There is nothing to fear,” and in silence he pressed her hand.“Youhavebeen good to me.”There was a knell in the words. They were the epitaph of their life together.“I think,” he said, “that, if we were so foolish as to tot up the gains on either side, mine would be the greater.”Again she pressed his hand.“I’m not a bit like Josephine really, am I?”“My dear child.” He was very near tears. “My dear child, not a bit.”So he left her.What was she afraid of? His judgment of her? That had come up as a dark rain-heavy cloud. But it had passed without shedding its waters. Now, yielding to the tenderness and pity she had just roused in him, he was led to an inly knowledge of her. She was afraid of her love, afraid of her own devouring absorption in it. (Something of the kind he had known himself, in early days with her.) So she clung to material things, to the existence they had together builded, to his own proven kindness, and, as she clung, only the fiercer burned the flame within her, flickering destruction to everything she cherished. Sooner or later she must yield. He saw that, but also he knew that to precipitate the severance might be forever to condemn her to her dread, so that she would be withered with it. But if, of her own despair, or fierce ecstasy, or sudden illumination of the inmost friendliness of what she feared, came surrender, then would she win through to the ways of brightness, and be mistress of her own lifeand love. He had passed his own alternative, an easy choice; he could see on to hers, a more grinding test. He shuddered for her, and, knowing its peril, made no move to help.Often he would absent himself from the chambers for days together. The atmosphere was too explosive, the strain too great. She would see him to the door and kiss his cheek, and her eyes would say:“Perhaps I shall be gone when you come back. You understand?”And he would turn his eyes away because they said too much.But she did not go.For many weeks she did not see her lover. Old Mole knew that because she was home earlier from the theater and was rarely out in the afternoon, and spent much time in writing—she who could never write without an effort—letters, the charred fragments of which he found in the hearth. Then she was restless and frantically busy:Ruefully he would think:“Idiots! They are trying to give it up for me.”What if they did give it up? He began excitedly to persuade himself that they would redeem their fault, find nobility in self-sacrifice. But that would not do. He was too wary a guardian of his egoism. That would not do. They had nothing to gain from it. They could give him back nothing. They had taken nothing from him. What she had been to herlover was something which she had never been, never could be, to him. . . . That was how he now phrased it to himself. His love had fashioned her, shaped her, made her lovely: it had needed another love to breathe life into her. And, warming into life, she was afraid of life.He saw Panoukian in the street. Lean the young man was, and drawn, and pale, prowling: a figure of thin hunger, famished and desperate. He saw Old Mole and swerved to avoid him, but he was not quick enough, and his arm was squeezed with a timid friendliness. He gave a nervous start, butted forward with his head and snarled:“Go to Hell!”And he broke away and wriggled like an eel into the crowd.“God help us!” said Old Mole, “for we are making pitiable fools of ourselves. The vulgar snap and quarrel would be better than this. . . . No, it would not.”It was painfully amusing to him to see Matilda’s face in the picture-postcard shops. The photographers had touched her up into a toothy popular beauty, blank, expressionless, fatuous. It was the woman’s face with the woman painted out: just a mask, signifying nothing, never a thought, never a feeling, never a desire, and not a spark of will. To thousands of young men it would serve as an ideal of womanhood, and they would slop their calfish emotions over it; they would go to see her in thetheater, covet her with mealy lasciviousness. What a filthy business was the theater! He wished to God he had never let her enter it, and told himself things would have been very different then. But would they? What had he given her to hold her? What ultimately had he given her? Tenderness and little kindnesses, indulgence and fondling: but those were only so many trinkets, little flowers plucked in the hedgerows and passed to the fair companion. But finally, finally, what had he given her? And bitterly he said:“Instruction. . . . A damned ugly word.”She had been his pupil, he her master. At every step he had instructed her, not tritely as a Mr. Barlow, but he had been Barlowish, and that was bad. He had never admitted her to equality. How could he? He had never admitted himself to equality with his inmost self. He had always, as it were, instructed himself, set out upon the crowded way of life with mnemonic precepts, and gathered more and more of them, so that he had never, after childhood, drawn upon his innate knowledge, that was more than knowledge. Without its use his life had, for convenience, been split up into parts more and more, with passing years, at variance with each other. And when the time came to give his life he was no longer master of it. He could lend this and that and the other part; lend, in usury, for only a life can be given. . . . He had brought her to suffering: the much he had given her, the pleasantness and ease, making her only the more intimately feel her needof the more he might have given. He had brought her to suffering and through her suffering he was beginning to learn.When he thought of her suffering he was tempted to say to her—perhaps not in words—“You will not go. I will. I will leave you free.” But that would be to lay her under another obligation, and once more to instruct. The thing was beyond good and evil now: they three were passing through the inmost fire of life. Absurdly he thought of the three Hebrews of the Bible and of an old rhyme his nurse had been used to gabble at him and Robert when they were little boys:
Du bist wie eine Blume.So rein und schön und hold . . .
Du bist wie eine Blume.
So rein und schön und hold . . .
Like nearly every lover who has any acquaintance with the German language, he had tagged Heine’s verses on to his beloved. He clutched at them now. They were still apt. He used them as a weapon with which to drive back the cause of morality, but he was still very far from the mastery of himself and the affair—l’affaire Panoukian.He was the victim of a fixed idea—the taxicab, the hotel door swinging round, the low-hanging clouds, the Nelson statue. . . . George II had caused the death of Königsmarck, but his sympathies had never been with George II; besides that was a monarch, and not even the success of “Lossie Loses” and his acquaintance with half the Cabinet would enable him with impunity to procure the death of Panoukian. Apart from the defence of honor and the cause of morality, what do men do in the circumstances?
He was to receive instruction. . . .
In the reading room he picked up an evening newspaper. It was pleasant to hold a tangible object in his fingers and to pass into the reporteddoings of the great and the underworld. He had heard gossip of the final catastrophe of a notoriously wretched marriage. The divorce proceedings were reported in the paper. The husband—Old Mole knew him slightly and did not like him—gave evidence to show himself as a noble and generous creature, near heartbroken, and the woman, whom his selfishness had driven into a desperate love, as light or hysterical. It was such a distortion of the known facts, such an audacious defiance of the knowledge common to all polite London, that Old Mole was staggered. He read the report again. One sentence of the evidence was almost a direct appeal for sympathy. Knowing the man, he could picture him standing there, keeping his halo under his coat-tails and donning it at the right moment. It was theatrical and very adroit.
“Bah!” said Old Mole. “He is groveling to the public, sacrificing even his wife to the many headed.”
And his sympathies were with the woman. At least she had shown courage, and the man had lied and asked for admiration for it: so honor was defended and the cause of morality served.
A little knot of men in the room were discussing the case. Their sympathies were with the man.
“If a woman did that to me,” said the nearest man, “I’d thrash her, I would. Thank God, I’m a bachelor.”
“I don’t know what women are coming to,” said a fat little man, as cosily tucked into his chair as ahazel nut in its husk. “They seem to think they can do just as they please.”
A tall thin man said:
“It all began with the bicycle. Women have never been the same since bicycles came in.”
“It wouldn’t have been so bad,” said the fat little man, “if they’d cut and run.”
And Old Mole repeated that sentence to himself.
“What I can’t understand is,” said the first speaker, who seemed the most indignant, “why he didn’t shut her up until she had come to her senses. After all, we are all human, and that is what I should have done. If women won’t regard the sacredness of the home, where are we?”
“Surely,” said Old Mole, incensed into speaking, “it depends on the home.”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” retorted the nearest man with some heat. “It does not. In these matters you can’t make exceptions. Home is home, and there is no getting away from it. If a woman grows sick of her home it is her own fault and she must stick to it, dree her own weird, as the Scotch say. Destroy the home and society falls to the ground.”
And Old Mole, sharpened by argument, replied:
“Society is no more permanent than any other institution. Its existence depends entirely on its power to adapt itself to life. It is certainly independent of the innumerable sentimental ideas with which men endeavor to plaster up the cracks in its walls, among which I must count that of home.”
The three men gaped at him. He continued:
“Home, I conceive, has a meaning for children. It is the place in which they grow up. We make homes for our young as the birds make nests for theirs. When the children go forth then the home is empty and is no longer home. Men are no longer patriarchs and no more do they gather the generations under one roof-tree. . . . In the case under discussion there were no children, therefore there was never a home to defend or regard as sacred. Man and woman alike had placed themselves in a false position. What further they had to suffer we do not know. We know that the man took refuge in the closest egoism, and the woman finally in the restless adventure of which we know no more than has been reported to a newspaper by a dull and mechanical shorthand writer. My own view is that, where there are no children, society at large is not interested. Society is only interested in any marriage in so far as it will provide children to ensure its continued existence. Once children are born it is interested to see that they are fed, clothed and educated. (How effectively our present society pursues that interest you may easily observe if you will visit East or South London.) Beyond that its interference, explicit or covert, seems to me to be an unwarrantable intrusion into the privacy of the human soul. No one of us here is in a position to judge of the affair which is the occasion of your argument, and . . . and . . . I beg your pardon for interfering with it.”
He rose and passed out the room, leaving threevery surprised clubmen behind him. But none of them could be more surprised than himself: surprised and relieved he was. He had been sickened at the idea of a woman being delivered up to the chatter of idle tongues, and in the violence of his distress had come by an absolute certainty that any dignified issue to his present affection could only come through an unprejudiced and unsentimental consideration of the whole facts. It was not going to be easy; but, dear God, he wanted something difficult, something really worth doing to counteract his misery. When he thought of himself and the ache at his heart he was blinded with tears and could see the facts only from one angle—his own.
Du bist wie eine Blume,So rein und schön und hold . . .
Du bist wie eine Blume,
So rein und schön und hold . . .
Seen from that angle, Matilda was reduced in stature, distorted, ugly, mean. But he had loved her, loved her, and must still have the truth of her: more than ever before he needed to understand her. The beauty and delight and youth he had enjoyed in her must not go down in bitterness.
One saying he took away with him from the club:
“It wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d cut and run.”
Perhaps, he thought to himself, they had “cut and run.” And for him it became worse, to think that she had gone, without a word, with never a complaint,just gone. He remembered the night when she had said she was miserable, when he had found her in her bed, after the play, with her room in a litter. And he fell to thinking of the trials he must have put upon her, probing for all the possible offences, secret, subtle, unsuspected, of body and soul that might be laid at his door. There were many that he could think of, but his darkest hours came then when he perceived the fine balance, the perilous poise of married life, the imperceptible dovetailing of interests and habits and humors, the regions beyond perception where souls meet. Its nice complications were almost terrifying: at thousands of points men and women might fail, offend each other, crush each other, destroy, never dreaming of the cause, never, at the time, marking the effect. For such an adventure there need be heroism: to break, when even failure and offence and mutual exasperation bind, strength and courage superhuman or despairing. And men judge! And condemn! They measure this subtlest and most searching relationship with opinions and dull compromise and rules.
He was tortured with the thought of all the injuries he might have done her, and he invented more, invented burdens that he had never put upon her to account for her going away from him, with never a word. For three days he lived in this torment, winding about and about from general to particular and back again by the most circuitous route, aRundreisewith the current morality for Baedeker. And everynow and then the obsession would stab home to his heart—the hotel door swinging, the flat infidelity. Once, when the pain was so mortal that he could contain himself no longer, he wrote to her at the hotel. He posted the letter. That was on the second day. On the third he was in an agony. No answer came.
On the fourth day a telegram arrived from the Sussex village and an hour later she, brown, healthy, with a grand swing in her walk, a new depth of bosom, a squarer carriage of the shoulders; a rich bloom on her. She kissed his cheek.
He stared and stared at her. He looked for change in her.
“You!”
“Didn’t you get my telegram?”
“Oh! yes.”
“I’ll take my things off, and we’ll have some tea.”
She left him. He stood at the head of the little stairs leading down to her apartments, and he trembled and was near weeping. In her room he could hear her singing to herself, happily, blithely as a bird, with a full note that caught at his heart. She seemed to sing no song, but a melody, young and joyous with a full summer gaiety. The sun shone through the staircase window upon his hand where he clutched the balustrade. He was gripping it so tight that the veins stood out and the skin on his knuckles was white. A tear fell on his hand and he looked down at it. It was a plump, podgy, puckered middle-aged hand.
He whisked back into his room as he heard her door open.
They had tea, and he could not take his eyes off her. She thought he looked ill and pulled down. On his desk she saw the pile of his papers.
“You’ve been writing,” she said. “You’ve been overdoing it. It’s never safe to leave a man alone.”
“Yes,” he replied. “I have written a good deal.”
“Is it a story?”
“No. Not exactly a story.”
“Is it finished?”
“No. I doubt if it will ever be finished now.”
She began to talk of the theater. She had been wired for to resume her part, as her understudy was proving unsatisfactory. Further she had had two offers. One to appear in a new musical comedy, the other of a part in a play to be produced at a little “intellectual” theater for eight matinées. She felt inclined, she said, to accept both. It would mean very hard work, but it would be experience, and it was flattering to be noticed by the superior persons of the stage. And she asked his advice. He thought it might be too much for her to have so much rehearsing and to play in the evening as well. That she brushed aside. She was feeling splendid, strong enough to act a whole play.
“You are becoming a regular Copas,” he said.
She laughed; he, too, and they plunged into reminiscences of the old days.
“I sometimes think,” he said, “that those were the happiest months of my life.”
“Nonsense. There’s always more and more in front.”
“For you.”
She went off into peals of laughter, for she had just remembered the encounter with the prize-fighter. Her sturdy gaiety simply swept him off his feet, and he could only follow in the train of her mood. They made so merry that they lost count of the time, and she suddenly sprang to her feet with a cry and scurried away, dinnerless, not to be late at the theater.
“I ought to have told her,” he said to himself. “I ought to have said: ‘I know.’ . . . But how fine she looked! How happy she must be!”
Happy? There was something in her mood beyond happiness: a zestful strength, a windiness that seemed to blow through every cranny of her soul, whipping the blood in her veins, so that she could not pause for states and conditions of the spirit, nor check herself to avoid unhappiness in herself or others. She was like a ship in full sail, bending to the wind, skimming over tossing seas. She was gallant. She was what he had always hoped she might become. There was in her such a new flood of vitality that he felt ashamed at the thought of bidding her pause to submit to his inquisition. Impossible to check her flight, cruel suddenly to present her with the meanness of what she had done while she was still glowing with its splendor.
He had caught something of her glow, and now he wrestled to break free of rules of conduct andmoral codes, and he began, at last, to consider his problem in terms of flesh and blood. There were three points of view to be mastered: three lives knotted together in a tangle and the weakest strand would be broken.
He felt hopeful. There would be a fight for it, and to that he thrilled. He had the exaltation of one on the brink of great discovery.
He went to fetch her from the theater. The stagedoor lay at the back in an alley joining two great thoroughfares. As he entered the alley from one end he saw Matilda and Panoukian leave by the other, and he had his arm in hers. Old Mole turned, with the fluttering sense of an escape, glad not to have met them. And when he had controlled himself he was amused to think that they could not have dreaded the encounter more than he.
He took a long walk to delay his return, and when he reached the chambers they were in darkness. He crept softly down the little stairs and tried her door. It was locked.
In a moment’s panic he thought that this time she had really “cut and run,” and he was almost stunned with his terror of it. It was too soon, too soon: it would be disastrous; he would be left without understanding, to the mercy of the obsession; he had not all the threads in his hands; until he had, it would be rash folly to snap. He stood against her door, with his ear to the panel, holding his breath, straining to hear. There were explosive noises inthe house. From the room he could catch nothing for them. Closer and closer he pressed to the door, his ear against the panel. He lurched and the panel creaked. Silence. He heard her stir in her bed.
She was there! That was all he wanted to know. On tiptoe he crept away. . . . She was there! He would yet gather all the threads and then he or she would snap. One or other would be broken.
What had he then? The evidence of his own eyes. Was that not enough? It was enough for prescribed remedies, to which he could not resort without revenge, for which he had not now the least desire. What his eyes had seen was so isolated, so severed from the rest of his life as to be monstrous and injurious. By itself it was damnable harlotry. (There was a sort of boyish satisfaction in fishing out the words of a grosser age with which to bespatter it and make it even more offensive to pure-mindedness.) But, as he loved the woman, it could not stand by itself. He was in it, too. Actions cannot be judged by themselves. There must have been an antecedent conspiracy of circumstance and fault to lead to such misdemeanor.
With a tight control of himself he could now almost think of it without jealousy (hardly any of that was left but the quick, shallow jealousy of the brute), but he could not think of it without passion, and through that he could discern its inherent passion and, faintly, respond to it. That put an end to all mean suspicions of a conspiracy against himself, or of cowardly contriving to enjoy stolen fruitand leave no trace. . . . She had locked the door against him. So much was definite, and he had a sort of envying admiration for her that she could be precise while he was still floundering and groping for understanding. . . . Certainly he had never seen her so sure of herself.
But then, if she were so sure, why did she not “cut and run.” Then it would not be so bad. For a flash he saw the thing with the eyes of a fat clubman; the passion in him ebbed and he lost grip, and blundered into a mist. A lunge forward cleared him. She was sure of herself, so sure that she was giving no thought to her position except as it immediately presented itself. The new factor in her life called for no change, and everything she had was enriched by it, her possessions, her work, even her domestic life. It must all seem to her clear gain, and therefore she was sure. She loved her love, and everything that had led to it, and therefore she was sure.
From that flight upward Old Mole came to the sensation of falling. He was possessed by a prevision, felt that in a moment he would see all things plain, would know exactly what was going to happen. He strained forward, felt sleep overcoming him, struggled against it, and fell asleep.
Then Matilda was busy all day rehearsing, and, during the little time he had with her, she talked the slang and gossip of the theater. Once she asked after the work, and he read a little of it to her, andshe liked it and he plucked up courage to go on with it. She laughed at his cuts at women and admitted that he had thrust home at more than one of her own foibles. He had written part of a chapter on theTheater as Education.She could make nothing of that. The theater to her was a place in which you played “parts,” sometimes good and sometimes bad, and you were always waiting for the supreme, all-conquering “part” to turn up. She did what she was asked to do to the very best of her ability; that was her work and she did not look beyond it. The flattering side of London, its pleasures, fashions and functions had fallen into the background and she gave it just the attention which her interest seemed to demand. It never struck her as strange that she should be given no more of a play than her own part to read, and if she had been given the play would probably not have read it. She learned her part, movements and gestures, cues during rehearsal, and never watched any scene in which she did not appear.
By her part in the “intellectual” play she was mystified. None of her Copas or Butcher tricks were in the least suited to it. She had an enormous part to learn: all talk, gibes at marriage, and honor, and wealth, and domesticity, all the fetishes of the theater in which she was beginning to find her footing. The manager of the theater was his own producer; he had chosen her because she looked the part, “the rising temperament,” he called it, and he added to her bewilderment with the invention of elaborate detail to break the flood of talk, and, inthe absence of action, to bind the play together. Everyone in that theater spoke of the play with awe, so she concealed her perplexity and brought it to Old Mole.
“There are no scenes in it,” she said. “No cues. Nothing you can take hold of. I say my lines: the other people in the play don’t seem to take any notice of them, but just go on talking. I suppose it’s very clever, but it isn’t acting. I don’t believe even my uncle could do anything with it.”
He recommended her to read the play, and she procured a copy from the author. When she had read it she said:
“I know why nothing happens in it. There isn’t a soul in it who cares about anybody else. It’s all teasing. They can’t do anything else because they don’t care. And they have nothing really to talk about, so I suppose that’s why they discuss the Poor Law Commission, and the Cat and Mouse Bill, and the Social Evil and all sorts of things I never heard of.”
Old Mole read it, and found it clever, amusing, but sterilizing and exhausting, and, in its essence, he could not find that it was very different from “Lossie Loses” or the contrivances of the Butcher repertory. It was just as unimaginative. It had come into existence, not from any spiritual need, but entirely to rebut Butcherdom. Butcherdom shadowed it. The author in writing his play seemed first of all to have thought what would happen in a Butcher entertainment in order to decide on somethingdifferent. He had not moved from Butcher back to life, but had run from Butcher down a blind alley. And the result was an almost brilliant hotchpotch with a strong savor of hatred and contempt and the tartness of isolation. Contempt for Butcher might be its strongest motive, but alone it could not account for it. Old Mole sought loyally for the best, but could find nothing nobler than the desire for admiration. The author was not scrupulous, nor was he ingenious; his bait for reputation was the ancient and almost infallible trick of measuring his cleverness by the stupidity of others.
It lacked theatrical effectiveness and therefore it was impossible to get its meaning or even a drift of it into Matilda’s head. She learned her lines like a parrot, delivered them like a parrot—(thoroughly to the satisfaction of the producer)—looked charming in her expensive gowns and attracted the notice of the critics. The author told an interviewer that his play was a masterpiece of its kind, and that Matilda was one of the most remarkable actresses on the English stage. The piece ran for its eight matinées and was then heard of no more, but to Old Mole it had much value. It set him wondering. The stage had nothing to show but the false emotions of Butcherdom and the absence of emotion of the “intellectuals.” The theater must express the life of the country or it could not continue to exist, as it indubitably did. There was always a new playhouse being built. Money was poured into the theater through the stagedoor and through the box-office,but its best efforts were shown in childish fancy. It was at its healthiest and least odiously pretentious in the presentation of melodrama, with its rigid and almost idiotic right and wrong, its stupid caricature of the workings of the human heart. If it had a tradition, melodrama was its only representative. The plays of Shakespeare were melodrama in the hands of a man of genius. Without genius the national drama was heavy and lumpish, stolidly clinging to unquestioned and untested values, looking for no higher rewards in life than riches and public esteem.
It was astonishing to Old Mole that he could be so deeply interested in these things. He had expected to be absorbed in his sorrow and the problem of handling it. Then he found that he was testing the two theaters, the Butcherish and the “intellectual,” by the passion that had flamed into his heart through his love for Matilda at the moment when it had been outraged. In neither was there a spark to respond to his fire. The Butcher theater was a corpse; the intellectual theater that same corpse turned in its grave. And it amused him to imagine how his case would be handled in them; in the one it would be measured by rule of thumb—the eternal triangle, halo’d husband, weeping wife, discomfited lover, or, if violent effects were sought for, the woman damned to an unending fall, the two men stormily thanking their vain and shallow God they were rid of her; in the other it would be talked out of court, husband and wife would never rise above asnarl, and lover would go on talking; in both men and women would be cut and trimmed to fit in with a formula. In the one the equation would be worked out pat; in the other it would go sprawling on and on like the algebraic muddle of a flurried candidate in an examination who has omitted a symbol and gone on in desperate hope of a result.
Old Mole had discarded formulæ. He was dealing with a thing that had happened. Judgment of it, he said, was futile. The issue of it depended not on himself alone. As its consequences unfolded themselves he must apply the test of passion, grasp and, so far as possible, understand, and let passion burn its way to an outlet.
Familiarity with this mystery, straining on from day to day, soon made it possible for him to accept the surface happenings of life without resentment.
For her part in the musical comedy Matilda took singing and dancing lessons, so that she was out all day and every day. She was to receive a salary twice as large as any she had yet earned, and would be financially independent even though she indulged her extravagance, than which nothing was less probable. In all the working side of her life he took a very comfortable pride. If she was not altogether his creation, at least he had helped her to shape herself, and it was a delight to see her character taking firm lines. And, as he watched her, he thought of the current sentimental prating of motherhood and its joys and its concomitant pity of mendebarred from them, the absurdity of the segregation of the sexes: as if love were not in its essence creative; as if it had not begun to create before it reached consciousness; as if men could only take the love of woman, as in a pitcher, to spill it on the ground; as if love were not always beyond giving and taking, reaching out and out to create, lifting half-formed creatures into Being. . . . By the side of the other two theaters the musical comedy stage seemed almost to shine in candor, and he was glad that Matilda—the Matilda of his creation—should pass into it to charm the chuckle-heads out of their dullness.
She passed into it gleefully and he was able to separate her from that other Matilda in whom there was a passion at grips with his. He was certain now that it was passion and no vagary, for, day by day, under her working efficiency, she gained in force, and warmth and stature.
For five weeks Panoukian had made no appearance in Gray’s Inn. Then one day he came with a fat Newfoundland puppy, a present for Matilda. She was out. Old Mole received him.
“Hullo!”
“How do! sir.”
They stood looking at each other, Old Mole holding the door back, Panoukian hesitating on the threshold with the puppy in his arms.
Old Mole thought:
“I will speak to him. I will tell him what I think of him. I will make him feel what he is.”
He said:
“Come in.”
“Are you alone?” asked Panoukian.
“Yes. Come in.”
They entered Old Mole’s study, Panoukian first.
“She said she wanted a dog, so I brought her this.”
Panoukian put the puppy on the floor, walked over to the cigarette box and helped himself.
Old Mole opened his mouth to speak, but it was dry and he could make no sound. He ran his tongue over his lips. At last he shot out:
“Panoukian!”
Panoukian was pulling the puppy from under the bookcase. He turned and faced Old Mole with his schoolboy expression of wondering what now might be his guilt. He looked so young that none of the words with which Old Mole was preparing to crush him—scoundrel, traitor, villain, blackguard—was anything but inept. He was just engagingly, refreshingly young; younger than he had ever been, even as a boy. The discontent, the hardness and strain of revolt had faded from his eyes; they were clear and bright. He was as fresh as the morning. Plainly he had no thought beyond the puppy and the pleasure he had hoped to bring with it, and was startled by the harshness of the pedagogic note in Old Mole’s exclamation, startled into shyness.
Old Mole’s determination crumbled away: his laudable resolve was whisked away from him. He excused himself with this:
“I have no right to speak to him before I have come to an understanding with her.”
There was embarrassment between them, the awkwardness of master and pupil. To bridge it he said:
“It is a long time since you have been to see us.”
Directly he had said it he knew that he had contributed to their deception, but while he was seeking a means of withdrawal Panoukian pounced on his opportunity and dragged their three-cornered relationship back to the old footing: and Old Mole could not altogether disguise his relief.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve been so busy. Old Harbottle is running a private ball, and there’s been a tremendous lot of work up and down the country.”
“Up and down the country,” repeated Old Mole.
“Yes. Harbottle’s beginning to listen to what I say. I’ve been giving him some telling questions lately, and he’s already cornered the Front Bench twice. . . . The old idiot is beginning to discover the uses of impersonal unpopularity as an instrument of success. He would never have taken the plunge by himself, and he’s very grateful to me.”
“So you are beginning to do something?”
“You can’t do much in politics. I used to think you could. You can’t do first-rate things, but I’m beginning to realize that it’s a second-rate job.” He grinned. “The odd thing is that, since I realized that, I’m getting quite to like old Harbottle. He’s second-rate. He doesn’t know it, of course, because he hasn’t the least notion of what a first-rateman is like. He is perfectly cast-iron second-rate. Most surprising of all is that I am beginning to see that every man has the right to be himself—subject, of course, to every other man’s right to kick him for it.”
“Eh?”
Old Mole was startled. Tolerance was the last thing he expected from Panoukian; it was entirely out of keeping with his boyishness. He waited for more, but nothing came; and this was the most astonishing of all, for there Panoukian sat, boyish, glistening with youth, enunciating a maxim of tolerance, and actually relishing silence. Panoukian, having nothing more to say, was content to say nothing! . . . It was too bad. Almost it seemed that he had gone through all his misery for nothing. He had striven to master his situation only at every turn to be met with the triumph of the unexpected. He had decided to start by seeing the affair from Matilda’s point of view and Panoukian’s, and now, ludicrously, maddeningly, they had both changed, and both, apparently, were being intent on showing an amicable front to him. They were—and he writhed at the thought—they were trying to spare his feelings.
An admirable maxim that! Panoukian, of course, had every right to be Panoukian;ergo,if needs must, to change into another Panoukian. The young man’s placid, contented, comfortably absorbed silence was exasperating.
“Panoukian!” said Old Mole.
Panoukian groped out of his silence.
“Yes, sir.”
(Ludicrously boylike he looked, all wide-eyed, deliberate innocence.)
“There is a passage in Montaigne which, I think, excellently illustrates the observation you made some time ago. It is over there at the end of the bookcase.”
Panoukian rose and strolled over to the shelf indicated, his back toward Old Mole, who sprang to his feet, strode, breathing heavily, glared fixedly at the round apex of the angle of Panoukian and lunged out in a lusty kick. The young man pitched forward, righted himself, and swung round, with his hand soothing the coat-tail-covered portion of his body.
“Why the Hell did you do that?” he grunted.
“To illustrate your maxim,” said Old Mole, “and also to relieve my feelings.”
“If you weren’t who you are and what you are,” retorted Panoukian sharply, “I should knock you down.”
To that Old Mole could not find the apt reply, and once again, ruefully, he was forced to see that he had been betrayed into an absurdity. In that moment he hated Panoukian more than anyone he had ever known. He had been whirled by the unexpectedness of Panoukian into throwing away his one flawless weapon, his dignity, and without it he was powerless. Without it he could not even draw on the prescribed attitudes and remedies for gentlemenin his position. All the same he was thoroughly pleased to have caused Panoukian pain, and hoped he would be forced to take his meals from the mantelpiece for a day or two.
They stood glaring at each other, both wondering what would happen next. Panoukian retired gracefully from the conflict by stooping to pick up the puppy. Old Mole snorted, grabbed his hat, and stumped away and out of the chamber.
The callousness of Panoukian! The effrontery! That he should dare to show his face, and such an unabashed, innocent face! Where was that conscience which makes cowards of us all? . . . At any rate, thought Old Mole, after being kicked Panoukian would not venture to appear again. But was that so sure? Was it so certain that his unpremeditated act of violence would jolt Panoukian’s conscience into activity? Having swallowed the indignity of his position, would he not the more easily be able to digest affront and insult and humiliation? How if the kick had not settled the affair Panoukian?
From his own uneasiness and almost shame Old Mole knew that it had not, that possibly it might have only the effect of crystallizing the change of relation between himself and Panoukian, of obliterating the tie of affection, of equalizing matters, of slackening the rein on Panoukian, of releasing him from every other claim upon his affection, except the violent outpouring of love which had swept him intodisregard for convention, and honor, and the cause of morality. If there be degradation in violence, it affects the kicker as well as the kicked. Old Mole found himself very near understanding Panoukian. Clearly he had come to the chambers on an impulse. Matilda had desired a dog, he had seen the very dog, and come racing with it. Encountering Old Mole for the first time since the eruption in their affairs, he had carried the scene through with an admirable candor. There was no shiftiness in him, nor slyness: that would have been horrible, the sure indication of a beastly intrigue. No: either Panoukian was so possessed by his emotions, by the joy of what was probably his first full affair of the heart, that he could give no thought either to his own position or Matilda’s or her husband’s; either that or he was so intent on his passion, so absorbed by it, as to be lifted beyond scruples or thought of impediment, and was tearing away like a bolting horse, regardless of the cart behind or the cart’s occupants. In either case Old Mole felt that he had something definite to deal with, genuine feeling and no farded copy of it. And he felt sorry for the kick and wished he could withdraw it.
The very next day Panoukian came to dinner at half-past six. Matilda brought him. They had met by chance in the Strand, and she had persuaded him to come back with her.
The meal was to all appearances like hundreds of others they three had had together. Old Mole sat at the head of the table, with Matilda on one sideof him, Panoukian on the other, and he watched them. They did not watch him. They grinned at each other like happy children, and made absurd jokes and teased, and their most ordinary remarks seemed to have a secret and profound meaning for them. Sometimes they explained their references to Old Mole, and then it was always “We”—Panoukian said: “We,” Matilda: “Arthur and I” . . . and beneath all their talk there seemed to be a game, but a game in all seriousness, of fitting their personalities together. Every now and then, when they were filled with a bubbling consciousness of their wealth, they would throw a scrap to Old Mole out of sheer lavishness and babyish generosity. But other thought for or of him they had obviously none. They were not embarrassed by his presence, nor, to his amazement, was he by theirs. Only he was distressed, when they threw him a scrap of their happiness, to find that he knew not what to do with it, and could only put it away for analysis.
“I analyze and analyze,” he thought, “and there are they with the true gold in their hands, hardly knowing it for precious metal.”
Oh, yes! They were in love, and they had no right to be in love, and it was his duty to put an end to it.
But how?
He could only say: “This woman is my wife. I forbid her to explore any region of life which I cannot enter. She has no entity apart from me; herpersonality can find no food except what I am able or choose to provide for her.”
That was impossible, for it was not true.
More humanly he might say:
“I can understand that you love each other. But I cannot condone the selfishness it has led you to, or the secrecy. . . .”
There he stopped. There was no secrecy. They were disguising nothing. They did not tell him because their intimacy was, as yet, so preciously private an affair that it could not bear talking of; and he bowed to that and respected their reticence.
Matilda went to tidy her hair and he was left alone with Panoukian. They could find nothing to say to each other. The minds of both were full of the woman. Without her they fell apart, each into his separate world. And Old Mole knew that the issue of the adventure lay with her, and he knew that Panoukian looked for no issue and was living blindly in the present. He felt sorry for Panoukian.
The evening papers were thrust through the door. Panoukian fetched them and gave them to his host. The largest event of the day was the grave illness of Sir Robert Wherry.
“Dear, dear,” said Old Mole.
“I shouldn’t have thought he was human enough to be ill,” said Panoukian.
“It is ptomaine poisoning, set up by a surfeit of oysters.”
“There’ll be a terrific funeral. He was thegreatest of Harbottlers. He loved the public and his love was requited.”
And Old Mole thought of that other Harbottler who had so loved the public that he had trampled his wife in the mud to retain its esteem.
Matilda returned:
“Who’s coming to the theater with me?” she said, and her eyes lighted on Panoukian and she gave him a smile more profound, more subtle, more tenderly humorous than any she had ever bestowed on Old Mole. Both men rose. Old Mole reached the door first. With graceful generosity Panoukian bowed, yielded his claim, kissed Matilda’s hand, and took them to the door. Old Mole went first. Halfway down the stairs Matilda turned:
“Oh! Arthur,” she said, “the puppy’s a perfect darling.”
As coarse men take to drink, or philandering, or tobacco, to relieve the strain of existence, so Old Mole took to work. His “Out of Bounds” (Liebermann, pp. 453, 7s.6d.net) is a long book, but it was written, revised, corrected in proof and published within six months. It was boomed, and lay, unread, on every one’s drawing-room table. He received letters about it from many interesting personages, and from his sickbed Robert Wherry gave it his pontifical blessing. The Secretary of State for Education asked Old Mole to dinner, and declared sympathy with the criticism of the prevailing system, but shook his head dubiously over the probabilityof his department taking any intelligent interest in it.
“I quite agree,” he said, “that you ought to get at children through their imaginations, but imagination isn’t exactly a conspicuous quality of government departments.”
“Then I don’t see how you can govern,” said Old Mole.
“We don’t,” said the Secretary of State. “We take orders, like everybody else, but we are in a position to pretend that we are giving them. A government department is a great wheel going round very, very slowly, shedding regulations upon the place beneath. Every now and then, when none of the permanent officials is looking, an intelligent man can slip a real provision into the feeder and trust to luck for its finding the right need and the right place. . . . But it is not often we have the advantage of such thoroughly informed criticism, Mr. Beenham. The country is lamentably little interested in education, considering how much it has suffered from it.”
“I have suffered from it.”
He was amused by his celebrity. Every little group had a cast for him, but none of their bait attracted him in the least. He preferred to swim in his own waters, leisurely, painfully in the wake of Panoukian and Matilda. They at least knew where they were going, were possessed by an immediate object. Where all the politicians and scribes werelooking away from their own lives toward a reorganized society based on a change in humanity, a change not in degree but in kind, Panoukian and Matilda were changing, growing, responding to natural necessity. They were loving, loving themselves, loving life, their bodies, their minds, everything that body and mind could apprehend.
“There is no social problem,” said Old Mole, “there is only the moral problem, and that is settled by the act of living, or left in a greater tangle by the refusal to live.”
One night as he returned home from a dinner at a literary and artistic club he stood at the head of the little stairs looking down into the darkness. He was filled with regret for the past that had contained so much pleasantness and appalled by the vision of the future stretching on without Matilda, for it would be without her though she stayed under his roof. Between the theater and the other she gave so much that she had very little left for him—so little: gentleness and kindness and consideration, things which it were almost kinder not to give. It were best, he thought, that she should go and make her own life, with or without the other. She had her career, her work: friends she would always make, acquaintances she could always have in abundance. . . . And yet she stayed. He had felt dependent on her for the solution, for the proof, as it were, that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. But she stayed. There must then besomething that she treasured in her life with him. . . . And he was curious to know what it might be. Almost before he was aware of it he was down the little stairs and at her door, listening, and he was chilled with pity. She was weeping, and smothering the sound of it.
“Poor child!” he thought.
And he tapped lightly at her door. No sound. Again he tapped. She came then.
“I heard you,” he said. “It was more than I could bear.”
She led him into her room and made him sit on her bed as she slithered into it again. She would not have the light turned on.
“I couldn’t bear you to be unhappy. You have been so happy.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you want to go?” he asked.
“I’m afraid.”
At first he thought she meant she was afraid of the tongues of the many, but that fear could be no more than superficial. Hers was deep. It seemed to shake her as an angry wind a tree.
“Well, well,” he said.
She reached out in the darkness for his hand. In silence she pressed his hand, and then:
“You never know,” she said.
It was all she could tell him, that she was suffering. He said:
“There is nothing to fear,” and in silence he pressed her hand.
“Youhavebeen good to me.”
There was a knell in the words. They were the epitaph of their life together.
“I think,” he said, “that, if we were so foolish as to tot up the gains on either side, mine would be the greater.”
Again she pressed his hand.
“I’m not a bit like Josephine really, am I?”
“My dear child.” He was very near tears. “My dear child, not a bit.”
So he left her.
What was she afraid of? His judgment of her? That had come up as a dark rain-heavy cloud. But it had passed without shedding its waters. Now, yielding to the tenderness and pity she had just roused in him, he was led to an inly knowledge of her. She was afraid of her love, afraid of her own devouring absorption in it. (Something of the kind he had known himself, in early days with her.) So she clung to material things, to the existence they had together builded, to his own proven kindness, and, as she clung, only the fiercer burned the flame within her, flickering destruction to everything she cherished. Sooner or later she must yield. He saw that, but also he knew that to precipitate the severance might be forever to condemn her to her dread, so that she would be withered with it. But if, of her own despair, or fierce ecstasy, or sudden illumination of the inmost friendliness of what she feared, came surrender, then would she win through to the ways of brightness, and be mistress of her own lifeand love. He had passed his own alternative, an easy choice; he could see on to hers, a more grinding test. He shuddered for her, and, knowing its peril, made no move to help.
Often he would absent himself from the chambers for days together. The atmosphere was too explosive, the strain too great. She would see him to the door and kiss his cheek, and her eyes would say:
“Perhaps I shall be gone when you come back. You understand?”
And he would turn his eyes away because they said too much.
But she did not go.
For many weeks she did not see her lover. Old Mole knew that because she was home earlier from the theater and was rarely out in the afternoon, and spent much time in writing—she who could never write without an effort—letters, the charred fragments of which he found in the hearth. Then she was restless and frantically busy:
Ruefully he would think:
“Idiots! They are trying to give it up for me.”
What if they did give it up? He began excitedly to persuade himself that they would redeem their fault, find nobility in self-sacrifice. But that would not do. He was too wary a guardian of his egoism. That would not do. They had nothing to gain from it. They could give him back nothing. They had taken nothing from him. What she had been to herlover was something which she had never been, never could be, to him. . . . That was how he now phrased it to himself. His love had fashioned her, shaped her, made her lovely: it had needed another love to breathe life into her. And, warming into life, she was afraid of life.
He saw Panoukian in the street. Lean the young man was, and drawn, and pale, prowling: a figure of thin hunger, famished and desperate. He saw Old Mole and swerved to avoid him, but he was not quick enough, and his arm was squeezed with a timid friendliness. He gave a nervous start, butted forward with his head and snarled:
“Go to Hell!”
And he broke away and wriggled like an eel into the crowd.
“God help us!” said Old Mole, “for we are making pitiable fools of ourselves. The vulgar snap and quarrel would be better than this. . . . No, it would not.”
It was painfully amusing to him to see Matilda’s face in the picture-postcard shops. The photographers had touched her up into a toothy popular beauty, blank, expressionless, fatuous. It was the woman’s face with the woman painted out: just a mask, signifying nothing, never a thought, never a feeling, never a desire, and not a spark of will. To thousands of young men it would serve as an ideal of womanhood, and they would slop their calfish emotions over it; they would go to see her in thetheater, covet her with mealy lasciviousness. What a filthy business was the theater! He wished to God he had never let her enter it, and told himself things would have been very different then. But would they? What had he given her to hold her? What ultimately had he given her? Tenderness and little kindnesses, indulgence and fondling: but those were only so many trinkets, little flowers plucked in the hedgerows and passed to the fair companion. But finally, finally, what had he given her? And bitterly he said:
“Instruction. . . . A damned ugly word.”
She had been his pupil, he her master. At every step he had instructed her, not tritely as a Mr. Barlow, but he had been Barlowish, and that was bad. He had never admitted her to equality. How could he? He had never admitted himself to equality with his inmost self. He had always, as it were, instructed himself, set out upon the crowded way of life with mnemonic precepts, and gathered more and more of them, so that he had never, after childhood, drawn upon his innate knowledge, that was more than knowledge. Without its use his life had, for convenience, been split up into parts more and more, with passing years, at variance with each other. And when the time came to give his life he was no longer master of it. He could lend this and that and the other part; lend, in usury, for only a life can be given. . . . He had brought her to suffering: the much he had given her, the pleasantness and ease, making her only the more intimately feel her needof the more he might have given. He had brought her to suffering and through her suffering he was beginning to learn.
When he thought of her suffering he was tempted to say to her—perhaps not in words—“You will not go. I will. I will leave you free.” But that would be to lay her under another obligation, and once more to instruct. The thing was beyond good and evil now: they three were passing through the inmost fire of life. Absurdly he thought of the three Hebrews of the Bible and of an old rhyme his nurse had been used to gabble at him and Robert when they were little boys: