“Don’t you believe in God?” asked Matilda.It came like a question from a child, and he had the adult’s difficulty in answering it, the doubt as to the interpretation that will be put upon his reply.“I believe,” he said slowly, “in the life everlasting, but my life has a beginning and an end.”“And you don’t think you go to Heaven or Hell when you’re—when you’re dead?”“Into the ground,” he said.Matilda shivered, and she looked crushed and miserable.“Why did you read that to me?” she said at last. “I was so happy before. . . . I’ve always had a feeling that you weren’t like ordinary people.”And she seemed to wait for him to say something, but his mind harped only on the words: “For there is nothing more that I can contrive and invent for thy delight,” and he said nothing. She rose wearily and took her hat and coat and the musquash collar that had been her pride, and left him.For hours he sat over the fire, brooding, flashing occasionally into clear logical sequences of thought, but for the most part browsing and drowsing, turning over in his mind women and marriage and the theater and genius, the authentic voice of the nature of things, the spirit of the universe that sweeps into a man’s brain and heart and burns away all the thoughts of his own small life and fills him with a music that rings out and resounds and echoes andfalls for the most part upon deaf ears or upon ears filled only with the clatter of the marketplace or the sweet whisperings of secret, treacherous desires. And he thought of the engines in that city, day and night, ceaselessly humming and throbbing, weaving stuffs and forging tools and weapons for the clothing and feeding of the bodies of men: the terrifying ingenuity of it all, the force and the skill, the ceaseless division and subdivision of labor, the multiplication of processes, the ever-increasing variety of possessions and outward shows and material things. But through all the changes in the activities of men, behind all their new combinations of forces “all things are the same forever and ever. . . .” He remembered then that he had hurt Matilda, that she had resented his not being “like ordinary people,” resented, that is, his acceptance of the unchanging order of things, his refusal to confuse surface change with the mighty ebb and flow of life. It was, he divined, that she had never reached up to any large idea and had never conceived of any life, individual or general, outside her own. To her, then, the life everlasting must meanherlife, and he regretted having used that phrase. She was concerned, then, entirely with her own existence—(and with his in so far as it overlapped hers)—and life to her was either “fun” or something unthinkable. . . . . It seemed to him that he was near understanding her, and he loved her more than ever, and a rare warmth flooded his thoughts and they took on a life of their own, werebodied forth, and in a sort of ecstasy, thrilling and triumphant, he had the illusion of being lifted out of himself, of soaring and roaming free and with a power altogether new to him, a power whereof he was both creator and creature, he saw out of his own circumscribed area of life into another life that was no replica of this, but yet was of the same order, smaller, neater, trimmer, concentrated, and distilled. There was brilliant color in it and light and shade sharply distinct, and everything in it—houses, trees, mountains, hills, clouds—was rounded and precise: there was movement in it, but all ordered and purposeful. The sun shone, and round the corner there was a selection of moons, full, half, new, and crescent, and both sun and moon could be put away so that there should be darkness. As for stars, there were as many as he chose to sprinkle on the sky. . . . At first he could only gaze at this world in wonder. It sailed before him in a series of the most dignified evolutions, displaying all its treasures to him; mountains bowed and clouds curtseyed, and Eastern cities came drifting into view, and ships and islands; and there were palaces and the gardens of philosophers, sea beaches whereon maidens sang and mermaids combed their hair; and there were great staircases up and down which moved stately personages in silence, so that it was clear there was some great ceremony toward, but before he could discover the meaning of it all the world moved on and displayed another aspect of its seemingly endless variety. And he was sated with it andasked for it to stop, and at last with a mighty effort he became more its creator than its creature, and, as though he had just remembered the Open Sesame, it stayed in its course. It stayed, and in a narrow, dark street, with one flickering light in it, and the brilliant light of a great boulevard at the end of it, he saw an old white-bearded man with a pack on his back and a staff in his hand. And the old man knew that he was there, and he beckoned to him to come into the street. So he went and followed him, and without a word they turned through a little dark gateway and across up a courtyard and up into a garret, and the old man gave him a sack to sit on and lifted his packet from his back and out of it built up a little open box, and hung a curtain before it. Old Mole settled on his sack and opened his lips to speak to the old man, but he had disappeared.The curtain rose.IIIINTERLUDEI may have lost my judgment and my wits, but I must confess I liked that play. There was something in it.THE SEAGULLIIIINTERLUDEGo now, go into the landWhere the mind is free and the heartBlooms, and the fairy bandAirily troops to the dusty mart;And the chatter and money-changingDie away. In fancy ranging,Let all the inmost honey of the worldSweeten thy faith, to see unfurl’dLove’s glory shown in every little partOf life; and, seeing, understand.BY a roadside, at the end of a village, beneath the effigy of a god, sat a lean, brown old man. He had no covering for his head and the skin of the soles of his feet was thickened and scarred. In front of him were two little boxes, and on his knees there lay open a great book from which he was reading aloud in an unknown tongue.From the village there came a young man, richly clad and gay, attended by two slaves. He saluted the effigy of the god and asked the old man what he might be reading. The old man replied that it was the oldest book in the world and the truest, and when he was questioned about the boxes he saidthat one of them contained riches and the other power. The young man looked into them and saw nothing. He laughed and spoke to one of his slaves, saying the old and the poor must have their fancies since there was nothing else for them, and, upon his orders, the slave filled the boxes with rice, and at once there sprung up two mighty trees. The slaves fled howling and the young man abased himself before the effigy of the god and stole away on his knees, praying. The old man raised his hands in thanksgiving for the shade of the trees, lifted them out of the boxes, and once more arranged them before him.In the wood hard by arose the sound of high words and out upon the road, brawling and storming, tumbled two youths, comely and tall and strong. They stopped before the old man and appealed to him.“Our father,” said he who first found breath, “is a poor man of this village, and I am Peter and my brother is Simon. Two days ago, on a journey, we saw the picture of the loveliest maiden in the world. We do not know her name, but we are both determined to marry her, and there is no other desire left in us. We have fought and wrestled and swum for her, but can reach no conclusion. I will not yield and he will not yield. Is all our life to be spent in wrangling?”The old man closed his book and replied:“The loveliest maiden in the world is Elizabeth, daughter of the greatest of emperors. If you arethe sons of poor men how can you ever hope to lift eyes to her? Look now into these boxes and you shall be raised to a height by which you shall see the Emperor’s daughter and not be hidden in the dust of her chariot.”They looked into the boxes, and Simon saw in the one a piece of gold, but Peter looked as well into the other, and in it he saw the face of his beloved princess and had no thought of all else. Simon asked for the first box and Peter for the second, and they received them and went their ways, Simon to the village and Peter out into the world, each gazing fascinated into his box.“To him who desireth little, little is given,” said the old man. “And to him who desireth much, much is given; but to neither according to the letter of his desire.”By the time he reached his village Simon had five gold pieces in his pocket, and as soon as he took one piece from the box another came in its place. He lent money to every one in the village at a large rate of interest and was soon the master of it. There began to be talk of him in the town ten leagues away and there came men to ask him for money. He moved to the town and built himself a big house, and it was not long before he began to look to the capital of the country.When he moved to the capital he had six houses in different parts of the country, racehorses, picture galleries, mines, factories, newspapers, and he headed the list of subscribers to the hospitals patronizedby the Royal Family. At first, in the great city, he was diffident and shy among the illustrious personages with whom he fraternized, but it was not long before he discovered that they were just as susceptible to the pinch of money as the carpenter and the priest and the bailiff and the fruiterer in his village. It was quite easy to buy the control of these important people without their ever having to face the unpleasant fact. More than one beautiful lady, among them a duchess and a prima donna of surpassing loveliness, endeavored to cajole him and to discover his secret. In vain; he could not forget the Princess Elizabeth, and now ambition spurred him on. He was wearying of the ease with which fame and position and the highest society could be bought, and began to lust for power. With his native peasant shrewdness he saw that society consisted of the People, of persons of talent and cunning above them, of the descendants of persons of talent and cunning left high and dry beyond the reach of want, of ornamental families set at the head of the nations, of a few ingenious minds who (so far as there was any direction) governed the workings and interlockings of all the parts of the whole. They had control of all the sources of money except his box, and he determined, to relieve his boredom and also as a means of reaching his Princess, to pit his power against theirs.He was never ashamed of his mother, and she came to stay with him once a year for a week, but she never ceased to lament the loss of her other son,Peter, from whom no word had come. One night she had a dream, and she dreamed she saw Peter lying wounded in a thicket, and she knew perfectly where it was and said she must go to find him. Simon humored her and gave her money for a long voyage. She went back to her own village and out upon the road until she came to the effigy of the god, for this was the only god she knew, and she prayed to him. The old man appeared before her and told her to go to her home, for Peter would return to her before she died. At this she was comforted, and went home to her husband and sent Simon back his money, because she was afraid to keep so large a sum in the house.It was said in the capital that the land of the greatest of emperors was the richest of all countries, but the people were the stupidest and had no notion of its wealth. The financiers were continually sending concessionaires and adventurers, but they came away empty-handed. Simon had now paid his way into the royal circle, and for defraying the debt on the royal stable had been ennobled. He suggested to the King that he should send an embassy to invite the greatest of emperors and his daughter to pay a visit to the capital to see the wonders of their civilization.The embassy was sent, the invitation accepted, and the Emperor and the Princess arrived and their photographs were in all the illustrated papers. They did not like this, for in their own country only one portrait of the Emperor was painted, and that wasthe life work of the greatest artist of the time. The Princess was candor itself, and said frankly what she liked and what she did not like. She liked very little, and after she had been driven through the capital she sent for the richest man in the country, and Simon was brought to her. He bowed before her and trembled and told her that all his wealth was at her service. So she told him to pull down all the ugly houses and the dark streets and to make gardens and cottages and to give every man in them a piece of gold.“They will only squander it,” said Simon.“Let them,” replied the Princess Elizabeth. “Surely even the most miserable may have one moment of pleasure.”“In your country are there no poor?”“There are no rich men. There are good men and bad men, and the good are rewarded, and honored.”As she ordered, so it was done, and the poor blessed the Princess Elizabeth, but the financiers muttered among themselves, and they arranged that one of their agents should go to the Emperor’s country, stir up sedition, and be arrested. Then they announced in their newspapers international complications, said day after day that the national honor was besmirched, and demanded redress. The Emperor and the Princess Elizabeth hurriedly left the capital and returned to their own country. Simon had declared his admiration for the Princess and she had snubbed him. His newspapers added to theoutcry, and he ordered a poet to write a national song, which became very popular:We ain’t a fighting nation,But when we do, we do.We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the cash,We’ve got the soldiers, too.So look out there and mind your eye,We’re out to do, we’re out to die,For God and King and country.But in the Emperor’s country all the songs were in praise of the Princess Elizabeth, and when she heard that ships of war were on the seas and huge vessels transporting soldiers, she consulted with the Minister and gave orders for all weapons to be buried and for all houses to be prepared to receive the guests and the great hall of the palace to be made ready for a banquet.Her Minister was Peter, and she delighted in his wisdom and never wearied of listening to the tale of his adventures, how in his quest he had been cheated, and robbed, and beaten, and cast into prison, and scourged, and bastinadoed, and incarcerated for a lunatic, and mocked and despised, nearly drowned by a mountain torrent, all but crushed by a huge boulder that came crashing down a hillside and carried away the tree beneath which he was sleeping; and how all these afflictions did but intensify his vision of that which he loved, so that the pain and the terror of them fell away and hewas left with the glorious certainty of being near his goal. He did not tell her what that was because it was very sweet to serve her, and he knew that she was proud and had rejected the hands of the greatest and handsomest princes of her father’s dependencies. It was very pleasant for him to see her emotion as he told his tale, and when she almost wept on the final adventure, how, as he neared her father’s city, he was set upon by a band of peasants, who believed him to be a blasphemer and a wizard because of his box, and left for dead, and how he awoke to find her bending over him, then he could scarcely contain himself, and he would hide his face and hasten from her presence.He had a little house in one of her private parks, and whenever she was in any difficulty she came to consult him, for his sufferings had made him sensible, and his devotion to a single idea gave him a nobility which she found not in her other courtiers.It was he, then, who advised the cordial reception of the hostile armies, for he had observed, in the numerous assaults of which he had been the victim, that when he hit back he only incensed his adversary and roused him to a madder pitch of cruelty. Also he had lived among soldiers and knew them to be slaves of their bellies and no true servants of any cause or idea. Therefore, he gave this counsel, and it was followed, and the army was disbanded, and the citizens prepared their houses and decorated the city against the coming of the army. When they arrived, all the populace turned out tosee them, and the generals and captains were met by the chief men, the poets, and the philosophers, and the scholars, and made welcome. There were feasting and fireworks, and the harlots devoted themselves to the service of the country, and by night a more drunken army was never seen. Their guns and ammunition were thrown into the harbor, and next day they were allowed to choose whether they would return to their own country or stay and become citizens of this. Nine-tenths of the soldiers chose to stay, many of them married and made honest women of the devoted creatures who had been their pleasure, and thus the causes of virtue and peace were served at once. The soldiers and their wives were scattered up and down the country, work was found for them, and both lost the rudeness and brutality induced by their former callings.The other tenth returned to their own country. Simon and the financiers heard their galling story and told the people that a glorious victory had been won and the nation’s flag, after horrible carnage, planted over yet another outpost of the Empire. There was immense enthusiasm. Shiploads of Bibles were sent out, and a hundred missionaries from the sixty-five different religious denominations.Peter’s advice was sought, and he ordered a cellar to be prepared. The Bibles were stored in this, and the missionaries were set to translate them back into the original languages. They had got no further than the twentieth chapter of Genesis whenthey declared their willingness to be converted to the religion of the country; but there was no professed religion, for, when the Princess had asked Peter what her father could best do to serve his subjects and make his name blessed among them, he had replied:“Let him abolish that which most engenders hypocrisy. Let him establish the right of every man to be himself. Let there be good men and bad men—since there must be good and bad—but no hypocrites. Let him withdraw his support from that religion which maintains priests, superstition and prejudice, and it will topple down. Faith is an act of living, not a creed.”At first the Emperor was afraid that if the State religion toppled he would come crashing down, but he could deny his daughter nothing, and he withdrew his support. In less than a year there was not a sign of the professed religion, and no one noticed its absence. There was a marked improvement in the behavior of the people and their good sense, which made it possible for Peter’s advice to be followed in dealing with the foreign army. There was a notable decrease in crime, and litigation became so infrequent that half the Courts of Justice were closed, and the Attorneys and Advocates retired into the country or adopted the profession of letters. With the money released by the disestablished religion and the reduced Courts of Justice the Emperor founded universities and schools and set apart money to endow maternity and medicine, saying:“We have all money enough for our pleasure, but it is when the shadow of a natural crisis comes over us that we are in need.”The Princess was loud in praise of her Minister, and the people and the men of letters declared that the Emperor really was the greatest ruler the world had ever seen. The Emperor swallowed it all as a good monarch should, but Peter was overcome with tenderness for his Princess, and, dreading lest he should betray his secret, he asked her leave to depart for a while, and betook him to his own country and his village to see his mother.She lay upon her deathbed and was very feeble. Simon had sent her some calf’s-foot jelly, but was too deeply engaged to come. Peter sat by her bedside and told her about his Princess, and she patted his hand and laughed merrily, and said:“You always were a bonny liar, laddie. Kiss me and take my blessing.”Peter kissed her and took her blessing, and she died.He went to the roadside where he had come by his box and his vision, but the old man was not there, the trees were cut down, and the effigy of the god had rotted away and only the stump of it was left. He planted an acorn in the place to mark the beginning of his joy in life, but, knowing that the act of breathing is prayer enough, he decided to go away and think no more about his good fortune or his bad fortune, or the profit he had drawn from both. He sighed over the thousands of miles thatseparated him from his Princess, and decided each day to reduce them by at least thirty.The news of the war had only just reached that part of the country, and he heard men talking of the glorious victory. At first he was alarmed, but when he heard more he laughed and told the men the truth. They took and ducked him in the horse pond for a spy and a traitor, and when he crawled out they thrashed him with whips until they had cut his clothes in ribbons and his flesh into weals. Then they put him in the old stocks and left him there for a day and a night. He was cold and hungry, and his bones ached, but when he found himself near to counting his miseries and wishing himself dead, then he took out his box and gazed at the image of the Princess and said to it:“Yet will I live to serve you. My life is nothing except it go to sustain the wonder of yours.”So he bore this calamity, as he had borne so many others, for her sake.He had no other clothes, and when he was released he patched and mended his suit and made his way, working and singing for his bread, to the capital. There he inquired after his brother, and men looked awed as they pronounced his name, and they all knew his house and the names of his racehorses, but of the rest they could tell very little. Peter went to the magnificent house, ragged as he was, and asked to see his brother. Two lackeys and a butler opened the door, and they lifted their noses at him. The butler said his lordship had brothers andfathers and cousins coming to see him all day long, but Peter persisted, and was told he might be his lordship’s brother, but his lordship was away on his lordship’s yacht and no letters were forwarded.Having no other interest in the capital, Peter set out on his return, and when he came to the frontier of the fortunate land that had nursed his Princess he was greeted with tidings that made his heart sink within him. A handsome stranger told him that the Emperor had enclosed the commons and great tracts of forest, and prospected the whole country for coal and oil and metals and precious stones, and how the poets and the philosophers and the scholars were cast down from their high places, and, most lamentable of all, how the Princess was imprisoned because she would not marry the new Emperor of Colombia, who had arrived in his yacht with untold treasures, and how her private parks were taken for menageries, racecourses and football grounds. Peter buried his head in his arms and wept.With the stranger he journeyed toward the capital. Over great tracts of the country there hung black clouds of smoke; new cities meanly built, hastily and without design, floundered out over the hills and meadows; pleasant streams were fouled; sometimes all the trees and the grass and plants and hedgerow bushes were dead for miles; and in those places the men and women were wan and listless and their poverty was terrible to see: there were tall chimneys even in the most lovely valleys,and in them were working pregnant women and little children, and Peter asked the stranger whose need was satisfied by their work.“There are millions of men upon the earth,” answered the stranger, “and what you see is industrial development. It drives men to a frenzy so that they know not what they do.”And when they came to the capital they found the frenzy at its height. It was no longer the peaceful and lovely city of Peter’s happiness; gone were the gardens and groves of myrtle and sweet-scented laurel; gone the beautiful houses and the noble streets; tall buildings of a bastard architecture, of no character or tradition, towered and made darkness; huge hotels invited to luxury and lewdness; the Emperor’s ancient palace was gone, and its successor was like another hotel, and in the avenue, where formerly the most gracious and distinguished of the citizens used to make parade amid the admiration and applause of their humble fellows, was now a throng of foreigners and vulgarians, Jews, Levantines, Americans, all ostentation and display. . . . Beneath the splendor and glitter linked a squalor and a sordid misery that called aloud, and called in vain, for pity. And in the outskirts were again the chimneys and the factories with the machines thudding night and day, and round them filth and poverty and disease. . . . The priests were back in their place to give consolation to the poor, who were beyond consolation, and the Courts of Justice were housed in the largest buildingin the world. At every street corner newspapers were sold.In a new thoroughfare driven boldly through the most ancient part of the city and flanked absurdly with common terraces of houses, they found a thin crowd standing in expectation. The two Emperors were to go by on their way to open the new Technical College and Public Library. They passed swiftly in an open carriage, and a faint little cheer went up, so different from the vast roar that used to greet the Emperor and the Princess in all their public appearances. The Emperor looked haggard and nervous, as though he were consumed with a fever, but the Emperor of Colombia was fat as a successful spider. Peter gasped when he saw him, for he was Simon. But he said nothing, and they passed on.Saddest sight of all were the prosperous, well-fed women gazing with dead eyes into the shop windows wherein were displayed fashionable garments and trinkets, overwhelming in their quantity.Preferable to that was the avenue with the Jews and the Levantines and the Americans. Thither with the stranger Peter returned, and he met a poet, lean and disconsolate, who had been his intimate friend. They three talked together, and the poet asked if there were no power to cool the heat and reduce the frenzy in the blood of the inhabitants of the country. Said the stranger:“There is a power which makes the earth a heaven; a power without which the life of men isno more than the life of tadpoles squirming in a stagnant pond.”Peter said the power must be Love: the poet declared it was Imagination.“Love in itself,” said the stranger, “is a human, comfortable thing; with the light of imagination, love is the living word of God in the heart of man.”And behold the stranger stood before them, an angel or genius clad all in white with wings of silver that rose above him and beat to flight, and away he soared to the sun. And the poet raised his head, and in a loud voice declaimed musical words, and Peter sobbed in his joy, but the Jews and the Levantines and the Americans had seen nothing, and wearily they drove and walked along the avenue, scanning each other in sly envy.Hard and bitter was the lot of the people, and their loyalty to the Emperor was shaken. There were none now to bless his name, none to call him the greatest of rulers, and only the priests praised him for his wisdom in yielding to the tide of progress. There was little happiness anywhere: the old superstitions and prejudices were restored to currency, the tyranny of public opinion was enthroned again, and books were written and plays performed to fortify its authority.Every day Simon sent the Princess richer presents and messengers to crave the boon of an audience; but the Princess made no reply and would never leave her apartments. Every day she used to stand at her window and gaze in the directionwhere Peter’s country lay and pray for his return. One day her ape was with her, and he chattered excitedly and hurled himself into the sycamore tree that grew beneath her window. He returned in a moment with an empty box. She looked into it and saw the image of Peter, as he was, ragged and unhappy, but with adoration in his eyes. Then she could no longer dissemble, but, with happy tears, she confessed to herself that she loved him. . . . Next day she walked in her garden, and on the other side of the little stream marking its boundary she saw Peter. They told their love, and he swore to deliver her and not to see her again until he had done so. With a brave heart she wished him Godspeed and threw him back his box, in which she had concealed three kisses and a lock of her hair.For forty days and forty nights did Peter remain in solitude, wrestling with himself and cogitating how he might best accomplish the salvation of his adored Princess and the country that was dearer to her even than himself. Step by step he followed Simon’s career from the time when he had chosen the box with the piece of gold to the golden ruin he had brought upon thousands of men. Then he resolved to send his own box to his brother; nay, himself to take it. He procured gorgeous apparel, and immense chests, and camels and horses and elephants, disguised a hundred and fifty of his friends in Eastern apparel, and in this array presented himself at the Summer Palace, where his brother was lodged. The doors were opened to him, and hewas passed on from lackey to lackey until he found himself in his brother’s presence. Simon greeted him cordially and asked for his news, and how he had fared.“I have all my desires,” said Peter. “I have fulfilled my destiny, and I am come to give you my box. It has served me well.”Greedily Simon snatched the box and opened it to see what treasure it might contain. He saw no image of beauty therein, but only himself, and the vision of his own soul crushed by the weight of his possessions, and the pride died in him and all the savage lusts to gratify which he had plotted and schemed and laid waste, and he groaned:“All my power is but vanity and my hopes are in the dust. I am become a monster and unworthy of the Princess Elizabeth.”His words rang through the Palace, and his servants and those who had called themselves his friends fell upon his possessions and divided them and fled from the country. So deserted, he embraced Peter and vowed that his brother’s love was now a greater treasure to him than all he had sought in his folly. They took counsel together and decided that they had best persuade the greatest of emperors to grant his people a Parliament so as to avert the imminent revolution. They did that, but it was too late. Peter’s procession through the streets to the Summer Palace had alarmed the people with the dread of another Imperial visitor as injurious as the last, and they had made barricades in the streets, andsacked the great hotels, and dragged the Emperor and all his counsellors and courtiers into the stews and there slaughtered them. The Princess Elizabeth was released and loyally acclaimed, and it was only on her intercession that Peter and Simon were spared. She granted the people a Parliament, and the Courts of Justice were taken for its House, and she opened and prorogued it in the regal manner.After a year of mourning, during which the wisest of laws were framed for the control of the mines and the factories and all the sources of wealth, and land and water were made all men’s and no man’s property, and the children were trained to believe in the revealed religion of love as the living word of God in the heart of man, then the Princess announced her marriage with her Minister and adviser, Peter, the son of a poor man, and they lived happily with their people, and all men loved and praised Peter, and Peter praised and worshiped the Princess Elizabeth. They lived to a ripe old age, gathering blessings as they went, and they had sixteen children.But Simon returned to his own country and his village, taking with him the two boxes. Out of the one he never took another piece of gold, and into the other he never looked until he was at peace with himself and knew that he could gaze upon his soul undismayed. When he looked into it he saw Peter and the Princess and their children, for all his love was with them. Then he went out upon the road, and beneath an enormous oak tree he foundthe lean, brown old man with his great book on his knees, reading aloud. He laid the boxes at his feet and bowed to him and said:“It is well.”The old man bowed, and, turning a page in his book, he read:“It is well with the world. Man frets his peace in his little hour on this earth, whereof he is and whereto he returns; but it is well with the world.”The curtain fell. The little theater disappeared, and all that he had seen and heard in it buzzed in Old Mole’s head, and the colors whirled and a flood of emotion surged through his body, and the spell of it all was upon him. He shifted uneasily upon the sack on which he was seated, and there came a rent in it. Inside it was a corpse, and, when he peered at it in horror, he knew that it was himself.The enchantment broke, and, shivering and very cold, he fell back into the world of familiar things, the room in the lodging house, with the fire out, and above his head, in the first floor front, lay Matilda, sleeping. He went up to her, and she lay with her hair back over her pillow and her hand under her cheek, and he said:“I will live to serve you. For my life is nothing except it go to sustain the wonder of yours.”Old Mole was much astonished at this effort of his imagination, and later on wrote and rewrote itmany times, but what he wrote was no more than the pale echo of what he had heard, the faded copy of what he had seen. When he came to analyze and diagnose his condition he concluded that the vivid impressions produced on his unexercised receptive mind had induced a kind of self-hypnotism in which he had been delivered up to the power of dreams subject peculiarly to the direction of his logical faculty. He could not remember having eaten anything that would account for it.IVTOYSWorte! Worte! Keine Thaten!Niemals Fleisch, geliebte Puppe,Immer Geist und keinen Braten,Keine Knödel in der Suppe.ROMANCEROIVTOYSWHEN the pantomime came to an end (as it did before a packed house, that cheered and cheered again and insisted on speeches from the comedians and the principal boy and the principal girl, and went on cheering regardless of last trains and trams and closing time) Matilda was told that, if she liked and if she had nothing better to do, she could return again next year. She declared her pleasure at the prospect, but inwardly determined to have something a great deal better to do. She had drawn blood from the public and was thirsting for more of it. Her condition was one with which Old Mole was destined to become familiar, but now he was distressed by her excitement, insisted that she was tired (she looked it), and decided on a holiday. She would only consent on condition that he allowed her to take singing lessons and would pay for them. Still harping on economy—for she could not get the extent and fertility of his means into her head—she pitched on Blackpool because she had a sort of cousin there who kept lodgings and would board them cheap. He tried to argue with her, and suggested Londonor Paris. But London had become to her the heaven to which all good “professionals” go, and Paris was very little this side of Hell for wickedness, and her three months in the theater had had the curious result of making her set great store by her estate as a married woman. To Blackpool they went and were withered by the March winds and half starved by Matilda’s cousin, who despised them when she learned that they were play actors. They were miserable, and for misery no worse setting could be found than an empty pleasure city. They frequented the theater, and very quickly Matilda made friends with its permanent officials and arranged for her singing lessons with the conductor of the orchestra, who was also organist of a church and eked out a meager living with instruction on the violin, ’cello, piano, organ, flute, trombone, tympani, voice production and singing—(all this was set forth on his card, which he left on Old Mole by way of assuring himself that all was as it should be and he would be paid for his trouble). Matilda had four lessons a week, and she practiced most industriously. “It was not,” said her instructor, “as though she were training for op’ra, but just to get the voice clear and refine it. . . .” He was very genteel, was Mr. Edwin Watts, and he did more for her pronunciation in a week than Old Mole had been able to accomplish in a year and more. His gentility discovered the gentleman in his pupil’s husband, and he invited them to his house, and gave them tickets for concerts and the Tower and a seriesof organ recitals he was giving in his church. He was a real musician, but he was alone in his music, for he had an invalid wife who looked down on his profession and would admit none of his friends to the house, which she filled with suites of furniture, china knickknacks, lace curtains and pink ribbons. The little man lived in perpetual distrust of himself, admired his wife because he loved her, and submitted to her taste, regarding his own as a sort of unregenerate longing. Neither Old Mole nor Matilda were musical, but, when his wife was out to tea with the wife of the bank manager or the chemist, Watts would invite them to his parlor and play the piano—Bach, Beethoven, Chopin—until they could take in no more and his music was just a noise to them. But there was no exhausting his capacity or his energy, and when they were thoroughly worn out he used to play “little things of his own.” He was very religious and full of cranks, a great reader of the advertisements in the newspapers, and there was no patent medicine, hair restorer, magnetic belt, uric acid antidote that he had not tried. He was proud of it, and used to say:“I’ve tried ’em all except the bust preservers.”It was precisely here that he and Old Mole found common ground. With his new mental activity Old Mole had become increasingly sensitive to any sluggishness in his internal organs and began to resent his tendency to fleshiness. He and Mr. Watts had immense discussions, and the musician produced remedies for every ailment and symptom.Matilda said they were disgusting, but Old Mole stuck to it, smoked less, ate less, took long walks in the morning, and attained a ruddiness of complexion, a geniality of manner, a sense of wellbeing that helped him, with surprising suddenness, to begin to enjoy his life, to delight in its little pleasures, and to laugh at its small mischances and irritations. With a chuckling glee he would watch Matilda in her goings out and her comings in, and he preferred even her assiduous practicing to her absence. He was amazed at the swiftness with which, on the backward movement of time, his past life was borne away from him, with his anxieties, his unrest, his bewilderment, his repugnance in the face of new things and new people. He found that he was no longer shy with other men, nor did he force them to shyness. He lost much of his desire to criticize and came by a warm tolerance, which saved him from being conscious of too many things at once and left him free to exist or to live, as the case might be. He felt ready for anything.When, therefore, Matilda announced that Mr. Watts had procured her an engagement with a No. 2 Northern Musical Comedy Company, touring, “The Cinema Girl” and “The Gay Princess,” he packed up his traps, told himself that he would see more of this astonishing England, and went with her. She had two small parts and was successful in them. And now, when she was in the theater, he no longer skulked in their lodgings nor divided her existence into two portions—his and the theater’s,but went among the company, joined in their fare and jokes and calamities, played golf with the principal comedian and the manager, and saw things with their eyes. This was easy, because they saw very little. They liked and respected him, and soon discovered that he had money. Matilda’s lot was made comfortable and her parts were enlarged. Neither she nor her husband attributed this to anything but her talent, and it made them very happy. Her name was on the program, and they cut out all the flattering references to her in the newspapers and pasted them into a book, and it were hard to tell which read them the oftener, he or she. He felt ready for everything, expanded like a well-tended plant; but with his unrest had gone much of his sympathy and the tug and tear of his heart on the sight of misery. He watched men now as they might be dolls, pranked up and tottering, flopping through their daily employments, staggeringly gesticulating through anger and love, herding together for pleasure and gain, and when both were won (or avoided), lurching into their own separate little houses. In this mood it pleased him to be with the dolls of the theater, because they were gayer than the rest, farded, painted, peacocking through their days. He caught something of their swagger, and, looking at the world through their eyes, saw it as separate from himself, full of dull puppets, bound to one place, caught in a mesh of streets, while from week to week he moved on. The sense of liberty, of having two legs where other men were shackled,was potent enough to carry him through the traveling on Sundays, often all day long, with dreary waits at empty, shuttered stations, and blinded him to the small miseries, the mean scandals, the jealousies, rivalries and wounded sensibilities which occupied the rest of the company. . . . There was one woman—she was perhaps forty-five—who sat opposite to him on three consecutive Sundays. She played, in both pieces, the inevitable dowager to chaperone the heroine; she was always knitting, and, with brows furrowed, she stared fixedly in front of her; her lips were always moving, and every now and then she would nod her head vigorously, or she would stop and stare desperately, and put her hands to her lips and her heart would leap to her mouth. At first Old Mole thought she was counting the stitches; but once, in the train, she laid aside her knitting and produced a roll of cloth and cut out a pair of trousers. Her lips went more furiously than ever, and suddenly her eyes stared and she held out her hand with the scissors as though to ward off some danger. Old Mole leaned across and spoke to her, but she was so taken up with her own thoughts that she replied:“Yes, it’s better weather, isn’t it?” jerked out a watery smile and withdrew into herself. When Old Mole asked Matilda why the woman counted her stitches even when she was not knitting, and why, apparently, she dropped so many stitches when she was, Matilda told him that the woman had lost her voice and her figure and could make very littlemoney, and had a husband who was a comedian, the funniest fellow in the world off the stage, but when he was “on” all his humor leaked away, and though he worked very hard no one laughed at him, and he, too, made very little money. They had six children, and all the time in the train the woman was making calculations. She often borrowed money, but that only added to her perplexity, because she could not bear not to pay it back.This story almost moved Old Mole, but his mood was too strong for him, and the woman only came forward to the foreground of the puppet show, a sort of link between the free players, the colored, brilliant dolls, and the drab mannikins who lived imprisoned in the background.His was a very pleasant mood to drift in and lounge and taste the soothing savor of irony, which dulls sharp edges and tempers the emphasis of optimism or pessimism. It seems to deliver the soul from its desire for relief and sops its hunger with a comfortable pity. But it is a lie. Old Mole knew it not for what it was and hugged it to himself, and called it wisdom, and he began to write a satire on education as he had known it in Thrigsby. He reveled in the physical labor of writing, in the company of his ideas as they took shape in the furnace of concentration, and what he had intended to be a short pamphlet grew into an elaborate account of his twenty-five years of respectable and respected service, showing the slow submergence of the human being into the machine evolved for the creation ofother machines. . . . He was weeks and months over it. The tour did not come to an end as had been anticipated, but was continued through the holiday months at the seaside resorts. They returned to Blackpool in August, and then he finished his work and read it to Edwin Watts. The musician had an enormous reverence for the printed word, and had never met an author before. His emotionalism warmed up and colored the dryness and bitterness of Old Mole’s tale, and he saw in it only a picture of suppression and starved imagination like his own. He applauded, and Old Mole was proud of his firstborn and determined to publish it. In his early days he had revised and prepared a book of Examination Papers in Latin accidence for a series, and to the publisher he sent his “Syntax and Sympathy.” It had really moved Edwin Watts, and he composed in its honor a sonata in B flat, which he dedicated “To the mute, inglorious Miltons of Lancashire.” It was played on the pier by a municipal band, but did not immediately produce any ebullition of genius.When Old Mole told Matilda that he had written a book she asked:“Is it a story?”“A sort of story.”“Has it a happy ending? I can’t see why people write stories that make you miserable.”“It’s a wonderful book,” said Edwin Watts.And Old Mole said:“I flatter myself there are worse books written.”When Watts had gone Matilda said:“If it’s not a nice book I couldn’t bear it.”“What do you mean—you couldn’t bear it?”“If it’s like that Lucretius you’re so fond of I’d be ashamed.”In the intoxication that still endured from the fumes of writing he had been thinking that the book was not incomparable with “De Rerum Natura,” something between that and the Satires of Juvenal.In a few weeks his manuscript returned with a polite letter from the publisher declining it, desiring to see more of Mr. Beenham’s work, and enclosing his reader’s report. It was short:“ ‘Syntax and Sympathy’ is satire without passion or any basis of love for humanity. There is nothing more damnable. The book is clever enough. It would be beastly in French—there is a plentiful crop of them in Paris; in England, thank God, with our public’s loathing of cleverness, it is impossible.”The author burned letter and report, and at night, when Matilda was at the theater, buried the manuscript in the sands.If there be any man who, awaking from a moral crisis, finds himself withered by the fever of it and racked with doubt as to his power to go boldly and warmly among his fellowmen without being battered and bewildered into pride or priggishness or cold egoism or thin-blooded humanitarianism, let him go to Blackpool in holiday time. There he will findhundreds of thousands of men, women and children; he will hear them, see them, smell them, be jostled and chaffed by them. He will find them in and on the water, on the sands, in the streets, in the many public places, shows and booths, in the vast ballrooms, straggling and stravading, smoking, drinking, laughing, guffawing, cracking coarse jokes, singing bawdy and patriotic songs with equal gusto, making music with mouth-organs, concertinas, cornets; young men and maidens kissing and squeezing unashamed, and at night stealing out to the lonely sands; old men and women gurgling over beer and tobacco, yarning over the troubles that came of just such lovemaking in their young days; and all hot and perspiring; wearing out their bodies, for once in a way, in pleasure, gross pleasure with no savor to it nor lasting quality, but coarse as the food they eat, as the beds they lie on, as the clothes they wear; forgetting that their bodies are, day in, day out, bent in labor, forgetting the pinch and penury of their lives at home, forgetting that their bodies have any other than their brutish functions of eating, drinking, sleeping, excretion and fornication. . . . Old Mole watched it all, and, true to his ironical mood, he saw the mass in little, swarming like ants; in the early morning of the great day these creatures were belched forth from the black internal regions of the country, out upon the seashore; there they sprawled and struggled and made a great clatter and din, until at the end of the day they were sucked back again. Intellectually it interested him. It was apageant of energy unharnessed; but it was all loose, unshaped, overdone, repeating itself again and again, so that at last it destroyed any feeling he might have had for it. He saw it through to the end, to the last excursion train going off, crammed in every compartment, with tired voices singing, often quite beautifully, in harmony.Matilda had refused to go out with him. She came home very late from the theater, and said she had been helping the knitting woman cut out some clothes. He asked her if she had ever seen the crowds in the pleasure city. She looked away from him, and with a sudden, almost imperceptible, gesture of pain replied:“Once.”He knew when that was, and with a tearing agony the old jealousy rushed in upon him and with a brutality that horrified him, that was whipped out of him, to the ruin of his self-control, he ground out:“Yes. I know when that was.”Her hand went tugging up to her breast and she said with passionate resentment:“You ought never to say a thing like that to me.”His blood boiled into a fury and he turned on her, but she was gone. He wrestled with himself, toiled and labored to regain his will, the mastery of his thoughts and his feelings. The jealousy died away, but no other emotion came to take its place. He regained his will, saw clearly again, but was more possessed by his irony than before. He wasno longer its master, no longer drifting comfortably, but its slave, whirled hither and thither at its caprice—and it was like a hot gusty wind blowing in him before a storm. All the color of the world was heavy and metallic, but it was painted color, a painted world. He was detached from himself, from Matilda, and he and she passed into the puppet show in the miserable liberty of the gaily painted dolls: free only in being out of the crowd, sharing none of the crowd’s energy, having no part in any solidarity.He made himself a bed on the hard horsehair sofa in their room and lay hour by hour staring at the window panes, listening to the distant thud and thunder of the sea, watching for the light to come to make plain the window and show up the colors of the painted world.In the morning they avoided each other, and she spent the day with the knitting woman, he with Edwin Watts, and, when, at night, she returned from the theater, he was asleep. It was the first time they had strangled a day, and it lay cold and dark between them. He admitted perfectly that he was at fault, but to say that he was sorry was a mockery and an untruth. He was not sorry, for he felt nothing.They bore the burden of their sullen acquiescence in silence into the third day, and then she said:“If you want me to go, I’ll go.”“No! No! I’ll go.”Silence had been torture, but speech was racking.They were at the mercy of words, and there was an awful finality about the wordgowhich neither desired and yet neither could qualify. . . . Plainly she had been weeping, but that exasperated him. She, at any rate, had found an outlet, and he had discovered none. And all the time he was haunted by the futility, the childishness of it all.“Where will you go?” she asked.“Does it matter?”“I suppose not. But some one must look after you.”He muttered unintelligibly.Was he—was he coming back? Of course he was. He would let her know.He went to Paris and stayed in his old hotel in the Rue Daunou. The exhilaration of the journey, the spirit of amusement that is in the air of the city of light, buoyed him up for a couple of days. He dined skillfully and procured the glow of satisfaction of a bottle of fine wine, sought crowds and the curious company of the boulevards, but as soon as he was alone again his inflation collapsed and he took pen, paper and thick paintlike ink and wrote his first letter to her. He began “my love,” crossed that out and substituted “my dearest,” tore up the sheet of paper and began “my dear.” He pondered this for a long time and wrote his initials and circles and squares on the paper, as it dawned on him that for the first time for nearly thirty years—well over twenty, at any rate—he was writing a love letter, that it had to be written, and that the last seriesupon which he had embarked was no sort of model for this. He chewed the ends and ragged threads of folly of his twenties and was astonished at the small amount of truth and genuine affection he could find in them, wondered, too, what had become of the waters of the once so easily tapped spring of ardor and affection. It seemed to him that he could mark the very moment of its subterranean plunge. It had been, had it not, when he had made his fruitless effort to escape from Thrigsby, when he had applied—in vain—for the Australian professorship. Then he had shut and locked the door upon himself, and he remembered clearly the day, at the beginning of term, when he had, with glowing excitement and a sort of tragical humor, saluted his Form Room as his lasting habitation. . . . Once more he scratched H. J. B. on the paper before him, but saw it not, for clearly in his mind was the vision of Matilda, lying in her bed with her hair thrown back over her pillow and her hand beneath her cheek, and the whiteness of her throat and the slenderness of her arms, the scent of her hair. . . . His heart was full again. He took another sheet of paper, and, with no picking of phrases, he wrote:
“Don’t you believe in God?” asked Matilda.
It came like a question from a child, and he had the adult’s difficulty in answering it, the doubt as to the interpretation that will be put upon his reply.
“I believe,” he said slowly, “in the life everlasting, but my life has a beginning and an end.”
“And you don’t think you go to Heaven or Hell when you’re—when you’re dead?”
“Into the ground,” he said.
Matilda shivered, and she looked crushed and miserable.
“Why did you read that to me?” she said at last. “I was so happy before. . . . I’ve always had a feeling that you weren’t like ordinary people.”
And she seemed to wait for him to say something, but his mind harped only on the words: “For there is nothing more that I can contrive and invent for thy delight,” and he said nothing. She rose wearily and took her hat and coat and the musquash collar that had been her pride, and left him.
For hours he sat over the fire, brooding, flashing occasionally into clear logical sequences of thought, but for the most part browsing and drowsing, turning over in his mind women and marriage and the theater and genius, the authentic voice of the nature of things, the spirit of the universe that sweeps into a man’s brain and heart and burns away all the thoughts of his own small life and fills him with a music that rings out and resounds and echoes andfalls for the most part upon deaf ears or upon ears filled only with the clatter of the marketplace or the sweet whisperings of secret, treacherous desires. And he thought of the engines in that city, day and night, ceaselessly humming and throbbing, weaving stuffs and forging tools and weapons for the clothing and feeding of the bodies of men: the terrifying ingenuity of it all, the force and the skill, the ceaseless division and subdivision of labor, the multiplication of processes, the ever-increasing variety of possessions and outward shows and material things. But through all the changes in the activities of men, behind all their new combinations of forces “all things are the same forever and ever. . . .” He remembered then that he had hurt Matilda, that she had resented his not being “like ordinary people,” resented, that is, his acceptance of the unchanging order of things, his refusal to confuse surface change with the mighty ebb and flow of life. It was, he divined, that she had never reached up to any large idea and had never conceived of any life, individual or general, outside her own. To her, then, the life everlasting must meanherlife, and he regretted having used that phrase. She was concerned, then, entirely with her own existence—(and with his in so far as it overlapped hers)—and life to her was either “fun” or something unthinkable. . . . . It seemed to him that he was near understanding her, and he loved her more than ever, and a rare warmth flooded his thoughts and they took on a life of their own, werebodied forth, and in a sort of ecstasy, thrilling and triumphant, he had the illusion of being lifted out of himself, of soaring and roaming free and with a power altogether new to him, a power whereof he was both creator and creature, he saw out of his own circumscribed area of life into another life that was no replica of this, but yet was of the same order, smaller, neater, trimmer, concentrated, and distilled. There was brilliant color in it and light and shade sharply distinct, and everything in it—houses, trees, mountains, hills, clouds—was rounded and precise: there was movement in it, but all ordered and purposeful. The sun shone, and round the corner there was a selection of moons, full, half, new, and crescent, and both sun and moon could be put away so that there should be darkness. As for stars, there were as many as he chose to sprinkle on the sky. . . . At first he could only gaze at this world in wonder. It sailed before him in a series of the most dignified evolutions, displaying all its treasures to him; mountains bowed and clouds curtseyed, and Eastern cities came drifting into view, and ships and islands; and there were palaces and the gardens of philosophers, sea beaches whereon maidens sang and mermaids combed their hair; and there were great staircases up and down which moved stately personages in silence, so that it was clear there was some great ceremony toward, but before he could discover the meaning of it all the world moved on and displayed another aspect of its seemingly endless variety. And he was sated with it andasked for it to stop, and at last with a mighty effort he became more its creator than its creature, and, as though he had just remembered the Open Sesame, it stayed in its course. It stayed, and in a narrow, dark street, with one flickering light in it, and the brilliant light of a great boulevard at the end of it, he saw an old white-bearded man with a pack on his back and a staff in his hand. And the old man knew that he was there, and he beckoned to him to come into the street. So he went and followed him, and without a word they turned through a little dark gateway and across up a courtyard and up into a garret, and the old man gave him a sack to sit on and lifted his packet from his back and out of it built up a little open box, and hung a curtain before it. Old Mole settled on his sack and opened his lips to speak to the old man, but he had disappeared.
The curtain rose.
I may have lost my judgment and my wits, but I must confess I liked that play. There was something in it.
THE SEAGULL
IIIINTERLUDE
Go now, go into the landWhere the mind is free and the heartBlooms, and the fairy bandAirily troops to the dusty mart;And the chatter and money-changingDie away. In fancy ranging,Let all the inmost honey of the worldSweeten thy faith, to see unfurl’dLove’s glory shown in every little partOf life; and, seeing, understand.
Go now, go into the land
Where the mind is free and the heart
Blooms, and the fairy band
Airily troops to the dusty mart;
And the chatter and money-changing
Die away. In fancy ranging,
Let all the inmost honey of the world
Sweeten thy faith, to see unfurl’d
Love’s glory shown in every little part
Of life; and, seeing, understand.
BY a roadside, at the end of a village, beneath the effigy of a god, sat a lean, brown old man. He had no covering for his head and the skin of the soles of his feet was thickened and scarred. In front of him were two little boxes, and on his knees there lay open a great book from which he was reading aloud in an unknown tongue.
From the village there came a young man, richly clad and gay, attended by two slaves. He saluted the effigy of the god and asked the old man what he might be reading. The old man replied that it was the oldest book in the world and the truest, and when he was questioned about the boxes he saidthat one of them contained riches and the other power. The young man looked into them and saw nothing. He laughed and spoke to one of his slaves, saying the old and the poor must have their fancies since there was nothing else for them, and, upon his orders, the slave filled the boxes with rice, and at once there sprung up two mighty trees. The slaves fled howling and the young man abased himself before the effigy of the god and stole away on his knees, praying. The old man raised his hands in thanksgiving for the shade of the trees, lifted them out of the boxes, and once more arranged them before him.
In the wood hard by arose the sound of high words and out upon the road, brawling and storming, tumbled two youths, comely and tall and strong. They stopped before the old man and appealed to him.
“Our father,” said he who first found breath, “is a poor man of this village, and I am Peter and my brother is Simon. Two days ago, on a journey, we saw the picture of the loveliest maiden in the world. We do not know her name, but we are both determined to marry her, and there is no other desire left in us. We have fought and wrestled and swum for her, but can reach no conclusion. I will not yield and he will not yield. Is all our life to be spent in wrangling?”
The old man closed his book and replied:
“The loveliest maiden in the world is Elizabeth, daughter of the greatest of emperors. If you arethe sons of poor men how can you ever hope to lift eyes to her? Look now into these boxes and you shall be raised to a height by which you shall see the Emperor’s daughter and not be hidden in the dust of her chariot.”
They looked into the boxes, and Simon saw in the one a piece of gold, but Peter looked as well into the other, and in it he saw the face of his beloved princess and had no thought of all else. Simon asked for the first box and Peter for the second, and they received them and went their ways, Simon to the village and Peter out into the world, each gazing fascinated into his box.
“To him who desireth little, little is given,” said the old man. “And to him who desireth much, much is given; but to neither according to the letter of his desire.”
By the time he reached his village Simon had five gold pieces in his pocket, and as soon as he took one piece from the box another came in its place. He lent money to every one in the village at a large rate of interest and was soon the master of it. There began to be talk of him in the town ten leagues away and there came men to ask him for money. He moved to the town and built himself a big house, and it was not long before he began to look to the capital of the country.
When he moved to the capital he had six houses in different parts of the country, racehorses, picture galleries, mines, factories, newspapers, and he headed the list of subscribers to the hospitals patronizedby the Royal Family. At first, in the great city, he was diffident and shy among the illustrious personages with whom he fraternized, but it was not long before he discovered that they were just as susceptible to the pinch of money as the carpenter and the priest and the bailiff and the fruiterer in his village. It was quite easy to buy the control of these important people without their ever having to face the unpleasant fact. More than one beautiful lady, among them a duchess and a prima donna of surpassing loveliness, endeavored to cajole him and to discover his secret. In vain; he could not forget the Princess Elizabeth, and now ambition spurred him on. He was wearying of the ease with which fame and position and the highest society could be bought, and began to lust for power. With his native peasant shrewdness he saw that society consisted of the People, of persons of talent and cunning above them, of the descendants of persons of talent and cunning left high and dry beyond the reach of want, of ornamental families set at the head of the nations, of a few ingenious minds who (so far as there was any direction) governed the workings and interlockings of all the parts of the whole. They had control of all the sources of money except his box, and he determined, to relieve his boredom and also as a means of reaching his Princess, to pit his power against theirs.
He was never ashamed of his mother, and she came to stay with him once a year for a week, but she never ceased to lament the loss of her other son,Peter, from whom no word had come. One night she had a dream, and she dreamed she saw Peter lying wounded in a thicket, and she knew perfectly where it was and said she must go to find him. Simon humored her and gave her money for a long voyage. She went back to her own village and out upon the road until she came to the effigy of the god, for this was the only god she knew, and she prayed to him. The old man appeared before her and told her to go to her home, for Peter would return to her before she died. At this she was comforted, and went home to her husband and sent Simon back his money, because she was afraid to keep so large a sum in the house.
It was said in the capital that the land of the greatest of emperors was the richest of all countries, but the people were the stupidest and had no notion of its wealth. The financiers were continually sending concessionaires and adventurers, but they came away empty-handed. Simon had now paid his way into the royal circle, and for defraying the debt on the royal stable had been ennobled. He suggested to the King that he should send an embassy to invite the greatest of emperors and his daughter to pay a visit to the capital to see the wonders of their civilization.
The embassy was sent, the invitation accepted, and the Emperor and the Princess arrived and their photographs were in all the illustrated papers. They did not like this, for in their own country only one portrait of the Emperor was painted, and that wasthe life work of the greatest artist of the time. The Princess was candor itself, and said frankly what she liked and what she did not like. She liked very little, and after she had been driven through the capital she sent for the richest man in the country, and Simon was brought to her. He bowed before her and trembled and told her that all his wealth was at her service. So she told him to pull down all the ugly houses and the dark streets and to make gardens and cottages and to give every man in them a piece of gold.
“They will only squander it,” said Simon.
“Let them,” replied the Princess Elizabeth. “Surely even the most miserable may have one moment of pleasure.”
“In your country are there no poor?”
“There are no rich men. There are good men and bad men, and the good are rewarded, and honored.”
As she ordered, so it was done, and the poor blessed the Princess Elizabeth, but the financiers muttered among themselves, and they arranged that one of their agents should go to the Emperor’s country, stir up sedition, and be arrested. Then they announced in their newspapers international complications, said day after day that the national honor was besmirched, and demanded redress. The Emperor and the Princess Elizabeth hurriedly left the capital and returned to their own country. Simon had declared his admiration for the Princess and she had snubbed him. His newspapers added to theoutcry, and he ordered a poet to write a national song, which became very popular:
We ain’t a fighting nation,But when we do, we do.We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the cash,We’ve got the soldiers, too.So look out there and mind your eye,We’re out to do, we’re out to die,For God and King and country.
We ain’t a fighting nation,
But when we do, we do.
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the cash,
We’ve got the soldiers, too.
So look out there and mind your eye,
We’re out to do, we’re out to die,
For God and King and country.
But in the Emperor’s country all the songs were in praise of the Princess Elizabeth, and when she heard that ships of war were on the seas and huge vessels transporting soldiers, she consulted with the Minister and gave orders for all weapons to be buried and for all houses to be prepared to receive the guests and the great hall of the palace to be made ready for a banquet.
Her Minister was Peter, and she delighted in his wisdom and never wearied of listening to the tale of his adventures, how in his quest he had been cheated, and robbed, and beaten, and cast into prison, and scourged, and bastinadoed, and incarcerated for a lunatic, and mocked and despised, nearly drowned by a mountain torrent, all but crushed by a huge boulder that came crashing down a hillside and carried away the tree beneath which he was sleeping; and how all these afflictions did but intensify his vision of that which he loved, so that the pain and the terror of them fell away and hewas left with the glorious certainty of being near his goal. He did not tell her what that was because it was very sweet to serve her, and he knew that she was proud and had rejected the hands of the greatest and handsomest princes of her father’s dependencies. It was very pleasant for him to see her emotion as he told his tale, and when she almost wept on the final adventure, how, as he neared her father’s city, he was set upon by a band of peasants, who believed him to be a blasphemer and a wizard because of his box, and left for dead, and how he awoke to find her bending over him, then he could scarcely contain himself, and he would hide his face and hasten from her presence.
He had a little house in one of her private parks, and whenever she was in any difficulty she came to consult him, for his sufferings had made him sensible, and his devotion to a single idea gave him a nobility which she found not in her other courtiers.
It was he, then, who advised the cordial reception of the hostile armies, for he had observed, in the numerous assaults of which he had been the victim, that when he hit back he only incensed his adversary and roused him to a madder pitch of cruelty. Also he had lived among soldiers and knew them to be slaves of their bellies and no true servants of any cause or idea. Therefore, he gave this counsel, and it was followed, and the army was disbanded, and the citizens prepared their houses and decorated the city against the coming of the army. When they arrived, all the populace turned out tosee them, and the generals and captains were met by the chief men, the poets, and the philosophers, and the scholars, and made welcome. There were feasting and fireworks, and the harlots devoted themselves to the service of the country, and by night a more drunken army was never seen. Their guns and ammunition were thrown into the harbor, and next day they were allowed to choose whether they would return to their own country or stay and become citizens of this. Nine-tenths of the soldiers chose to stay, many of them married and made honest women of the devoted creatures who had been their pleasure, and thus the causes of virtue and peace were served at once. The soldiers and their wives were scattered up and down the country, work was found for them, and both lost the rudeness and brutality induced by their former callings.
The other tenth returned to their own country. Simon and the financiers heard their galling story and told the people that a glorious victory had been won and the nation’s flag, after horrible carnage, planted over yet another outpost of the Empire. There was immense enthusiasm. Shiploads of Bibles were sent out, and a hundred missionaries from the sixty-five different religious denominations.
Peter’s advice was sought, and he ordered a cellar to be prepared. The Bibles were stored in this, and the missionaries were set to translate them back into the original languages. They had got no further than the twentieth chapter of Genesis whenthey declared their willingness to be converted to the religion of the country; but there was no professed religion, for, when the Princess had asked Peter what her father could best do to serve his subjects and make his name blessed among them, he had replied:
“Let him abolish that which most engenders hypocrisy. Let him establish the right of every man to be himself. Let there be good men and bad men—since there must be good and bad—but no hypocrites. Let him withdraw his support from that religion which maintains priests, superstition and prejudice, and it will topple down. Faith is an act of living, not a creed.”
At first the Emperor was afraid that if the State religion toppled he would come crashing down, but he could deny his daughter nothing, and he withdrew his support. In less than a year there was not a sign of the professed religion, and no one noticed its absence. There was a marked improvement in the behavior of the people and their good sense, which made it possible for Peter’s advice to be followed in dealing with the foreign army. There was a notable decrease in crime, and litigation became so infrequent that half the Courts of Justice were closed, and the Attorneys and Advocates retired into the country or adopted the profession of letters. With the money released by the disestablished religion and the reduced Courts of Justice the Emperor founded universities and schools and set apart money to endow maternity and medicine, saying:“We have all money enough for our pleasure, but it is when the shadow of a natural crisis comes over us that we are in need.”
The Princess was loud in praise of her Minister, and the people and the men of letters declared that the Emperor really was the greatest ruler the world had ever seen. The Emperor swallowed it all as a good monarch should, but Peter was overcome with tenderness for his Princess, and, dreading lest he should betray his secret, he asked her leave to depart for a while, and betook him to his own country and his village to see his mother.
She lay upon her deathbed and was very feeble. Simon had sent her some calf’s-foot jelly, but was too deeply engaged to come. Peter sat by her bedside and told her about his Princess, and she patted his hand and laughed merrily, and said:
“You always were a bonny liar, laddie. Kiss me and take my blessing.”
Peter kissed her and took her blessing, and she died.
He went to the roadside where he had come by his box and his vision, but the old man was not there, the trees were cut down, and the effigy of the god had rotted away and only the stump of it was left. He planted an acorn in the place to mark the beginning of his joy in life, but, knowing that the act of breathing is prayer enough, he decided to go away and think no more about his good fortune or his bad fortune, or the profit he had drawn from both. He sighed over the thousands of miles thatseparated him from his Princess, and decided each day to reduce them by at least thirty.
The news of the war had only just reached that part of the country, and he heard men talking of the glorious victory. At first he was alarmed, but when he heard more he laughed and told the men the truth. They took and ducked him in the horse pond for a spy and a traitor, and when he crawled out they thrashed him with whips until they had cut his clothes in ribbons and his flesh into weals. Then they put him in the old stocks and left him there for a day and a night. He was cold and hungry, and his bones ached, but when he found himself near to counting his miseries and wishing himself dead, then he took out his box and gazed at the image of the Princess and said to it:
“Yet will I live to serve you. My life is nothing except it go to sustain the wonder of yours.”
So he bore this calamity, as he had borne so many others, for her sake.
He had no other clothes, and when he was released he patched and mended his suit and made his way, working and singing for his bread, to the capital. There he inquired after his brother, and men looked awed as they pronounced his name, and they all knew his house and the names of his racehorses, but of the rest they could tell very little. Peter went to the magnificent house, ragged as he was, and asked to see his brother. Two lackeys and a butler opened the door, and they lifted their noses at him. The butler said his lordship had brothers andfathers and cousins coming to see him all day long, but Peter persisted, and was told he might be his lordship’s brother, but his lordship was away on his lordship’s yacht and no letters were forwarded.
Having no other interest in the capital, Peter set out on his return, and when he came to the frontier of the fortunate land that had nursed his Princess he was greeted with tidings that made his heart sink within him. A handsome stranger told him that the Emperor had enclosed the commons and great tracts of forest, and prospected the whole country for coal and oil and metals and precious stones, and how the poets and the philosophers and the scholars were cast down from their high places, and, most lamentable of all, how the Princess was imprisoned because she would not marry the new Emperor of Colombia, who had arrived in his yacht with untold treasures, and how her private parks were taken for menageries, racecourses and football grounds. Peter buried his head in his arms and wept.
With the stranger he journeyed toward the capital. Over great tracts of the country there hung black clouds of smoke; new cities meanly built, hastily and without design, floundered out over the hills and meadows; pleasant streams were fouled; sometimes all the trees and the grass and plants and hedgerow bushes were dead for miles; and in those places the men and women were wan and listless and their poverty was terrible to see: there were tall chimneys even in the most lovely valleys,and in them were working pregnant women and little children, and Peter asked the stranger whose need was satisfied by their work.
“There are millions of men upon the earth,” answered the stranger, “and what you see is industrial development. It drives men to a frenzy so that they know not what they do.”
And when they came to the capital they found the frenzy at its height. It was no longer the peaceful and lovely city of Peter’s happiness; gone were the gardens and groves of myrtle and sweet-scented laurel; gone the beautiful houses and the noble streets; tall buildings of a bastard architecture, of no character or tradition, towered and made darkness; huge hotels invited to luxury and lewdness; the Emperor’s ancient palace was gone, and its successor was like another hotel, and in the avenue, where formerly the most gracious and distinguished of the citizens used to make parade amid the admiration and applause of their humble fellows, was now a throng of foreigners and vulgarians, Jews, Levantines, Americans, all ostentation and display. . . . Beneath the splendor and glitter linked a squalor and a sordid misery that called aloud, and called in vain, for pity. And in the outskirts were again the chimneys and the factories with the machines thudding night and day, and round them filth and poverty and disease. . . . The priests were back in their place to give consolation to the poor, who were beyond consolation, and the Courts of Justice were housed in the largest buildingin the world. At every street corner newspapers were sold.
In a new thoroughfare driven boldly through the most ancient part of the city and flanked absurdly with common terraces of houses, they found a thin crowd standing in expectation. The two Emperors were to go by on their way to open the new Technical College and Public Library. They passed swiftly in an open carriage, and a faint little cheer went up, so different from the vast roar that used to greet the Emperor and the Princess in all their public appearances. The Emperor looked haggard and nervous, as though he were consumed with a fever, but the Emperor of Colombia was fat as a successful spider. Peter gasped when he saw him, for he was Simon. But he said nothing, and they passed on.
Saddest sight of all were the prosperous, well-fed women gazing with dead eyes into the shop windows wherein were displayed fashionable garments and trinkets, overwhelming in their quantity.
Preferable to that was the avenue with the Jews and the Levantines and the Americans. Thither with the stranger Peter returned, and he met a poet, lean and disconsolate, who had been his intimate friend. They three talked together, and the poet asked if there were no power to cool the heat and reduce the frenzy in the blood of the inhabitants of the country. Said the stranger:
“There is a power which makes the earth a heaven; a power without which the life of men isno more than the life of tadpoles squirming in a stagnant pond.”
Peter said the power must be Love: the poet declared it was Imagination.
“Love in itself,” said the stranger, “is a human, comfortable thing; with the light of imagination, love is the living word of God in the heart of man.”
And behold the stranger stood before them, an angel or genius clad all in white with wings of silver that rose above him and beat to flight, and away he soared to the sun. And the poet raised his head, and in a loud voice declaimed musical words, and Peter sobbed in his joy, but the Jews and the Levantines and the Americans had seen nothing, and wearily they drove and walked along the avenue, scanning each other in sly envy.
Hard and bitter was the lot of the people, and their loyalty to the Emperor was shaken. There were none now to bless his name, none to call him the greatest of rulers, and only the priests praised him for his wisdom in yielding to the tide of progress. There was little happiness anywhere: the old superstitions and prejudices were restored to currency, the tyranny of public opinion was enthroned again, and books were written and plays performed to fortify its authority.
Every day Simon sent the Princess richer presents and messengers to crave the boon of an audience; but the Princess made no reply and would never leave her apartments. Every day she used to stand at her window and gaze in the directionwhere Peter’s country lay and pray for his return. One day her ape was with her, and he chattered excitedly and hurled himself into the sycamore tree that grew beneath her window. He returned in a moment with an empty box. She looked into it and saw the image of Peter, as he was, ragged and unhappy, but with adoration in his eyes. Then she could no longer dissemble, but, with happy tears, she confessed to herself that she loved him. . . . Next day she walked in her garden, and on the other side of the little stream marking its boundary she saw Peter. They told their love, and he swore to deliver her and not to see her again until he had done so. With a brave heart she wished him Godspeed and threw him back his box, in which she had concealed three kisses and a lock of her hair.
For forty days and forty nights did Peter remain in solitude, wrestling with himself and cogitating how he might best accomplish the salvation of his adored Princess and the country that was dearer to her even than himself. Step by step he followed Simon’s career from the time when he had chosen the box with the piece of gold to the golden ruin he had brought upon thousands of men. Then he resolved to send his own box to his brother; nay, himself to take it. He procured gorgeous apparel, and immense chests, and camels and horses and elephants, disguised a hundred and fifty of his friends in Eastern apparel, and in this array presented himself at the Summer Palace, where his brother was lodged. The doors were opened to him, and hewas passed on from lackey to lackey until he found himself in his brother’s presence. Simon greeted him cordially and asked for his news, and how he had fared.
“I have all my desires,” said Peter. “I have fulfilled my destiny, and I am come to give you my box. It has served me well.”
Greedily Simon snatched the box and opened it to see what treasure it might contain. He saw no image of beauty therein, but only himself, and the vision of his own soul crushed by the weight of his possessions, and the pride died in him and all the savage lusts to gratify which he had plotted and schemed and laid waste, and he groaned:
“All my power is but vanity and my hopes are in the dust. I am become a monster and unworthy of the Princess Elizabeth.”
His words rang through the Palace, and his servants and those who had called themselves his friends fell upon his possessions and divided them and fled from the country. So deserted, he embraced Peter and vowed that his brother’s love was now a greater treasure to him than all he had sought in his folly. They took counsel together and decided that they had best persuade the greatest of emperors to grant his people a Parliament so as to avert the imminent revolution. They did that, but it was too late. Peter’s procession through the streets to the Summer Palace had alarmed the people with the dread of another Imperial visitor as injurious as the last, and they had made barricades in the streets, andsacked the great hotels, and dragged the Emperor and all his counsellors and courtiers into the stews and there slaughtered them. The Princess Elizabeth was released and loyally acclaimed, and it was only on her intercession that Peter and Simon were spared. She granted the people a Parliament, and the Courts of Justice were taken for its House, and she opened and prorogued it in the regal manner.
After a year of mourning, during which the wisest of laws were framed for the control of the mines and the factories and all the sources of wealth, and land and water were made all men’s and no man’s property, and the children were trained to believe in the revealed religion of love as the living word of God in the heart of man, then the Princess announced her marriage with her Minister and adviser, Peter, the son of a poor man, and they lived happily with their people, and all men loved and praised Peter, and Peter praised and worshiped the Princess Elizabeth. They lived to a ripe old age, gathering blessings as they went, and they had sixteen children.
But Simon returned to his own country and his village, taking with him the two boxes. Out of the one he never took another piece of gold, and into the other he never looked until he was at peace with himself and knew that he could gaze upon his soul undismayed. When he looked into it he saw Peter and the Princess and their children, for all his love was with them. Then he went out upon the road, and beneath an enormous oak tree he foundthe lean, brown old man with his great book on his knees, reading aloud. He laid the boxes at his feet and bowed to him and said:
“It is well.”
The old man bowed, and, turning a page in his book, he read:
“It is well with the world. Man frets his peace in his little hour on this earth, whereof he is and whereto he returns; but it is well with the world.”
The curtain fell. The little theater disappeared, and all that he had seen and heard in it buzzed in Old Mole’s head, and the colors whirled and a flood of emotion surged through his body, and the spell of it all was upon him. He shifted uneasily upon the sack on which he was seated, and there came a rent in it. Inside it was a corpse, and, when he peered at it in horror, he knew that it was himself.
The enchantment broke, and, shivering and very cold, he fell back into the world of familiar things, the room in the lodging house, with the fire out, and above his head, in the first floor front, lay Matilda, sleeping. He went up to her, and she lay with her hair back over her pillow and her hand under her cheek, and he said:
“I will live to serve you. For my life is nothing except it go to sustain the wonder of yours.”
Old Mole was much astonished at this effort of his imagination, and later on wrote and rewrote itmany times, but what he wrote was no more than the pale echo of what he had heard, the faded copy of what he had seen. When he came to analyze and diagnose his condition he concluded that the vivid impressions produced on his unexercised receptive mind had induced a kind of self-hypnotism in which he had been delivered up to the power of dreams subject peculiarly to the direction of his logical faculty. He could not remember having eaten anything that would account for it.
Worte! Worte! Keine Thaten!Niemals Fleisch, geliebte Puppe,Immer Geist und keinen Braten,Keine Knödel in der Suppe.ROMANCERO
Worte! Worte! Keine Thaten!
Niemals Fleisch, geliebte Puppe,
Immer Geist und keinen Braten,
Keine Knödel in der Suppe.
ROMANCERO
IVTOYS
WHEN the pantomime came to an end (as it did before a packed house, that cheered and cheered again and insisted on speeches from the comedians and the principal boy and the principal girl, and went on cheering regardless of last trains and trams and closing time) Matilda was told that, if she liked and if she had nothing better to do, she could return again next year. She declared her pleasure at the prospect, but inwardly determined to have something a great deal better to do. She had drawn blood from the public and was thirsting for more of it. Her condition was one with which Old Mole was destined to become familiar, but now he was distressed by her excitement, insisted that she was tired (she looked it), and decided on a holiday. She would only consent on condition that he allowed her to take singing lessons and would pay for them. Still harping on economy—for she could not get the extent and fertility of his means into her head—she pitched on Blackpool because she had a sort of cousin there who kept lodgings and would board them cheap. He tried to argue with her, and suggested Londonor Paris. But London had become to her the heaven to which all good “professionals” go, and Paris was very little this side of Hell for wickedness, and her three months in the theater had had the curious result of making her set great store by her estate as a married woman. To Blackpool they went and were withered by the March winds and half starved by Matilda’s cousin, who despised them when she learned that they were play actors. They were miserable, and for misery no worse setting could be found than an empty pleasure city. They frequented the theater, and very quickly Matilda made friends with its permanent officials and arranged for her singing lessons with the conductor of the orchestra, who was also organist of a church and eked out a meager living with instruction on the violin, ’cello, piano, organ, flute, trombone, tympani, voice production and singing—(all this was set forth on his card, which he left on Old Mole by way of assuring himself that all was as it should be and he would be paid for his trouble). Matilda had four lessons a week, and she practiced most industriously. “It was not,” said her instructor, “as though she were training for op’ra, but just to get the voice clear and refine it. . . .” He was very genteel, was Mr. Edwin Watts, and he did more for her pronunciation in a week than Old Mole had been able to accomplish in a year and more. His gentility discovered the gentleman in his pupil’s husband, and he invited them to his house, and gave them tickets for concerts and the Tower and a seriesof organ recitals he was giving in his church. He was a real musician, but he was alone in his music, for he had an invalid wife who looked down on his profession and would admit none of his friends to the house, which she filled with suites of furniture, china knickknacks, lace curtains and pink ribbons. The little man lived in perpetual distrust of himself, admired his wife because he loved her, and submitted to her taste, regarding his own as a sort of unregenerate longing. Neither Old Mole nor Matilda were musical, but, when his wife was out to tea with the wife of the bank manager or the chemist, Watts would invite them to his parlor and play the piano—Bach, Beethoven, Chopin—until they could take in no more and his music was just a noise to them. But there was no exhausting his capacity or his energy, and when they were thoroughly worn out he used to play “little things of his own.” He was very religious and full of cranks, a great reader of the advertisements in the newspapers, and there was no patent medicine, hair restorer, magnetic belt, uric acid antidote that he had not tried. He was proud of it, and used to say:
“I’ve tried ’em all except the bust preservers.”
It was precisely here that he and Old Mole found common ground. With his new mental activity Old Mole had become increasingly sensitive to any sluggishness in his internal organs and began to resent his tendency to fleshiness. He and Mr. Watts had immense discussions, and the musician produced remedies for every ailment and symptom.
Matilda said they were disgusting, but Old Mole stuck to it, smoked less, ate less, took long walks in the morning, and attained a ruddiness of complexion, a geniality of manner, a sense of wellbeing that helped him, with surprising suddenness, to begin to enjoy his life, to delight in its little pleasures, and to laugh at its small mischances and irritations. With a chuckling glee he would watch Matilda in her goings out and her comings in, and he preferred even her assiduous practicing to her absence. He was amazed at the swiftness with which, on the backward movement of time, his past life was borne away from him, with his anxieties, his unrest, his bewilderment, his repugnance in the face of new things and new people. He found that he was no longer shy with other men, nor did he force them to shyness. He lost much of his desire to criticize and came by a warm tolerance, which saved him from being conscious of too many things at once and left him free to exist or to live, as the case might be. He felt ready for anything.
When, therefore, Matilda announced that Mr. Watts had procured her an engagement with a No. 2 Northern Musical Comedy Company, touring, “The Cinema Girl” and “The Gay Princess,” he packed up his traps, told himself that he would see more of this astonishing England, and went with her. She had two small parts and was successful in them. And now, when she was in the theater, he no longer skulked in their lodgings nor divided her existence into two portions—his and the theater’s,but went among the company, joined in their fare and jokes and calamities, played golf with the principal comedian and the manager, and saw things with their eyes. This was easy, because they saw very little. They liked and respected him, and soon discovered that he had money. Matilda’s lot was made comfortable and her parts were enlarged. Neither she nor her husband attributed this to anything but her talent, and it made them very happy. Her name was on the program, and they cut out all the flattering references to her in the newspapers and pasted them into a book, and it were hard to tell which read them the oftener, he or she. He felt ready for everything, expanded like a well-tended plant; but with his unrest had gone much of his sympathy and the tug and tear of his heart on the sight of misery. He watched men now as they might be dolls, pranked up and tottering, flopping through their daily employments, staggeringly gesticulating through anger and love, herding together for pleasure and gain, and when both were won (or avoided), lurching into their own separate little houses. In this mood it pleased him to be with the dolls of the theater, because they were gayer than the rest, farded, painted, peacocking through their days. He caught something of their swagger, and, looking at the world through their eyes, saw it as separate from himself, full of dull puppets, bound to one place, caught in a mesh of streets, while from week to week he moved on. The sense of liberty, of having two legs where other men were shackled,was potent enough to carry him through the traveling on Sundays, often all day long, with dreary waits at empty, shuttered stations, and blinded him to the small miseries, the mean scandals, the jealousies, rivalries and wounded sensibilities which occupied the rest of the company. . . . There was one woman—she was perhaps forty-five—who sat opposite to him on three consecutive Sundays. She played, in both pieces, the inevitable dowager to chaperone the heroine; she was always knitting, and, with brows furrowed, she stared fixedly in front of her; her lips were always moving, and every now and then she would nod her head vigorously, or she would stop and stare desperately, and put her hands to her lips and her heart would leap to her mouth. At first Old Mole thought she was counting the stitches; but once, in the train, she laid aside her knitting and produced a roll of cloth and cut out a pair of trousers. Her lips went more furiously than ever, and suddenly her eyes stared and she held out her hand with the scissors as though to ward off some danger. Old Mole leaned across and spoke to her, but she was so taken up with her own thoughts that she replied:
“Yes, it’s better weather, isn’t it?” jerked out a watery smile and withdrew into herself. When Old Mole asked Matilda why the woman counted her stitches even when she was not knitting, and why, apparently, she dropped so many stitches when she was, Matilda told him that the woman had lost her voice and her figure and could make very littlemoney, and had a husband who was a comedian, the funniest fellow in the world off the stage, but when he was “on” all his humor leaked away, and though he worked very hard no one laughed at him, and he, too, made very little money. They had six children, and all the time in the train the woman was making calculations. She often borrowed money, but that only added to her perplexity, because she could not bear not to pay it back.
This story almost moved Old Mole, but his mood was too strong for him, and the woman only came forward to the foreground of the puppet show, a sort of link between the free players, the colored, brilliant dolls, and the drab mannikins who lived imprisoned in the background.
His was a very pleasant mood to drift in and lounge and taste the soothing savor of irony, which dulls sharp edges and tempers the emphasis of optimism or pessimism. It seems to deliver the soul from its desire for relief and sops its hunger with a comfortable pity. But it is a lie. Old Mole knew it not for what it was and hugged it to himself, and called it wisdom, and he began to write a satire on education as he had known it in Thrigsby. He reveled in the physical labor of writing, in the company of his ideas as they took shape in the furnace of concentration, and what he had intended to be a short pamphlet grew into an elaborate account of his twenty-five years of respectable and respected service, showing the slow submergence of the human being into the machine evolved for the creation ofother machines. . . . He was weeks and months over it. The tour did not come to an end as had been anticipated, but was continued through the holiday months at the seaside resorts. They returned to Blackpool in August, and then he finished his work and read it to Edwin Watts. The musician had an enormous reverence for the printed word, and had never met an author before. His emotionalism warmed up and colored the dryness and bitterness of Old Mole’s tale, and he saw in it only a picture of suppression and starved imagination like his own. He applauded, and Old Mole was proud of his firstborn and determined to publish it. In his early days he had revised and prepared a book of Examination Papers in Latin accidence for a series, and to the publisher he sent his “Syntax and Sympathy.” It had really moved Edwin Watts, and he composed in its honor a sonata in B flat, which he dedicated “To the mute, inglorious Miltons of Lancashire.” It was played on the pier by a municipal band, but did not immediately produce any ebullition of genius.
When Old Mole told Matilda that he had written a book she asked:
“Is it a story?”
“A sort of story.”
“Has it a happy ending? I can’t see why people write stories that make you miserable.”
“It’s a wonderful book,” said Edwin Watts.
And Old Mole said:
“I flatter myself there are worse books written.”
When Watts had gone Matilda said:
“If it’s not a nice book I couldn’t bear it.”
“What do you mean—you couldn’t bear it?”
“If it’s like that Lucretius you’re so fond of I’d be ashamed.”
In the intoxication that still endured from the fumes of writing he had been thinking that the book was not incomparable with “De Rerum Natura,” something between that and the Satires of Juvenal.
In a few weeks his manuscript returned with a polite letter from the publisher declining it, desiring to see more of Mr. Beenham’s work, and enclosing his reader’s report. It was short:
“ ‘Syntax and Sympathy’ is satire without passion or any basis of love for humanity. There is nothing more damnable. The book is clever enough. It would be beastly in French—there is a plentiful crop of them in Paris; in England, thank God, with our public’s loathing of cleverness, it is impossible.”
The author burned letter and report, and at night, when Matilda was at the theater, buried the manuscript in the sands.
If there be any man who, awaking from a moral crisis, finds himself withered by the fever of it and racked with doubt as to his power to go boldly and warmly among his fellowmen without being battered and bewildered into pride or priggishness or cold egoism or thin-blooded humanitarianism, let him go to Blackpool in holiday time. There he will findhundreds of thousands of men, women and children; he will hear them, see them, smell them, be jostled and chaffed by them. He will find them in and on the water, on the sands, in the streets, in the many public places, shows and booths, in the vast ballrooms, straggling and stravading, smoking, drinking, laughing, guffawing, cracking coarse jokes, singing bawdy and patriotic songs with equal gusto, making music with mouth-organs, concertinas, cornets; young men and maidens kissing and squeezing unashamed, and at night stealing out to the lonely sands; old men and women gurgling over beer and tobacco, yarning over the troubles that came of just such lovemaking in their young days; and all hot and perspiring; wearing out their bodies, for once in a way, in pleasure, gross pleasure with no savor to it nor lasting quality, but coarse as the food they eat, as the beds they lie on, as the clothes they wear; forgetting that their bodies are, day in, day out, bent in labor, forgetting the pinch and penury of their lives at home, forgetting that their bodies have any other than their brutish functions of eating, drinking, sleeping, excretion and fornication. . . . Old Mole watched it all, and, true to his ironical mood, he saw the mass in little, swarming like ants; in the early morning of the great day these creatures were belched forth from the black internal regions of the country, out upon the seashore; there they sprawled and struggled and made a great clatter and din, until at the end of the day they were sucked back again. Intellectually it interested him. It was apageant of energy unharnessed; but it was all loose, unshaped, overdone, repeating itself again and again, so that at last it destroyed any feeling he might have had for it. He saw it through to the end, to the last excursion train going off, crammed in every compartment, with tired voices singing, often quite beautifully, in harmony.
Matilda had refused to go out with him. She came home very late from the theater, and said she had been helping the knitting woman cut out some clothes. He asked her if she had ever seen the crowds in the pleasure city. She looked away from him, and with a sudden, almost imperceptible, gesture of pain replied:
“Once.”
He knew when that was, and with a tearing agony the old jealousy rushed in upon him and with a brutality that horrified him, that was whipped out of him, to the ruin of his self-control, he ground out:
“Yes. I know when that was.”
Her hand went tugging up to her breast and she said with passionate resentment:
“You ought never to say a thing like that to me.”
His blood boiled into a fury and he turned on her, but she was gone. He wrestled with himself, toiled and labored to regain his will, the mastery of his thoughts and his feelings. The jealousy died away, but no other emotion came to take its place. He regained his will, saw clearly again, but was more possessed by his irony than before. He wasno longer its master, no longer drifting comfortably, but its slave, whirled hither and thither at its caprice—and it was like a hot gusty wind blowing in him before a storm. All the color of the world was heavy and metallic, but it was painted color, a painted world. He was detached from himself, from Matilda, and he and she passed into the puppet show in the miserable liberty of the gaily painted dolls: free only in being out of the crowd, sharing none of the crowd’s energy, having no part in any solidarity.
He made himself a bed on the hard horsehair sofa in their room and lay hour by hour staring at the window panes, listening to the distant thud and thunder of the sea, watching for the light to come to make plain the window and show up the colors of the painted world.
In the morning they avoided each other, and she spent the day with the knitting woman, he with Edwin Watts, and, when, at night, she returned from the theater, he was asleep. It was the first time they had strangled a day, and it lay cold and dark between them. He admitted perfectly that he was at fault, but to say that he was sorry was a mockery and an untruth. He was not sorry, for he felt nothing.
They bore the burden of their sullen acquiescence in silence into the third day, and then she said:
“If you want me to go, I’ll go.”
“No! No! I’ll go.”
Silence had been torture, but speech was racking.They were at the mercy of words, and there was an awful finality about the wordgowhich neither desired and yet neither could qualify. . . . Plainly she had been weeping, but that exasperated him. She, at any rate, had found an outlet, and he had discovered none. And all the time he was haunted by the futility, the childishness of it all.
“Where will you go?” she asked.
“Does it matter?”
“I suppose not. But some one must look after you.”
He muttered unintelligibly.
Was he—was he coming back? Of course he was. He would let her know.
He went to Paris and stayed in his old hotel in the Rue Daunou. The exhilaration of the journey, the spirit of amusement that is in the air of the city of light, buoyed him up for a couple of days. He dined skillfully and procured the glow of satisfaction of a bottle of fine wine, sought crowds and the curious company of the boulevards, but as soon as he was alone again his inflation collapsed and he took pen, paper and thick paintlike ink and wrote his first letter to her. He began “my love,” crossed that out and substituted “my dearest,” tore up the sheet of paper and began “my dear.” He pondered this for a long time and wrote his initials and circles and squares on the paper, as it dawned on him that for the first time for nearly thirty years—well over twenty, at any rate—he was writing a love letter, that it had to be written, and that the last seriesupon which he had embarked was no sort of model for this. He chewed the ends and ragged threads of folly of his twenties and was astonished at the small amount of truth and genuine affection he could find in them, wondered, too, what had become of the waters of the once so easily tapped spring of ardor and affection. It seemed to him that he could mark the very moment of its subterranean plunge. It had been, had it not, when he had made his fruitless effort to escape from Thrigsby, when he had applied—in vain—for the Australian professorship. Then he had shut and locked the door upon himself, and he remembered clearly the day, at the beginning of term, when he had, with glowing excitement and a sort of tragical humor, saluted his Form Room as his lasting habitation. . . . Once more he scratched H. J. B. on the paper before him, but saw it not, for clearly in his mind was the vision of Matilda, lying in her bed with her hair thrown back over her pillow and her hand beneath her cheek, and the whiteness of her throat and the slenderness of her arms, the scent of her hair. . . . His heart was full again. He took another sheet of paper, and, with no picking of phrases, he wrote: