“Then you’re not going back?”“Never: neither to the old work, nor to the old kind of people.”“Not even when I tell you that Uncle Jocelyn is dead at last and has left us each ten thousand! Doesn’t that make any difference, H. J.?”H. J. received this intelligence almost with dismay. It took him back into the family councils, the family speculations as to Uncle Jocelyn’s will, the family squabbles over Uncle Jocelyn’s personal effects and their distribution, the family impatience at Uncle Jocelyn’s unconscionable long time in dying. And the vision of it all irritated and weighed heavilyon him. Often in Thrigsby he had said to himself that when Uncle Jocelyn died he would retire. And now Uncle Jocelyn was dead and he found his legacy rather a bewilderment than a relief. It was such a large sum of money that it made him fall back into his old sense of the grotesque in his relations with Mr. Copas and his galley, just when he was congratulating himself on being able to enter on his new life with real zest and energy.“No,” he said, “that makes no difference. I shall stay where I am.”“If there is ever any trouble,” replied Robert, “I shall be only too glad to help.”“Thank you.”Robert tapped at his mustache and said:“I suppose being married won’t interfere with your golf.”“I’m afraid it will.” This came very tartly.“Er. . . . Sorry.”That had flicked Robert on the raw. He had been feeling indulgent toward his demented brother until his more than doubtful attitude toward ten thousand pounds. When that was followed with the renunciation of golf he was genuinely distressed and went away muttering behind his mustache:“I give it up. I give it up. ’Pon my honor.Non compos,don’t y’know,non compos.”Nothing would induce Old Mole to visit Thrigsby again, and his solicitor had to send a clerk downwith documents for his signature. When all the legal threads were tied up he told Matilda the extent of his fortune, and how he had been asked to return to his position at the school.“Are you sorry?” she asked.“No.”“You sha’n’t ever be, for me. Will you read to me now?”And he read the first two acts of “King Lear.”“That isn’t the play you were reading the other day. The one about Venice and the man who was such a good soldier.”He had begun “Othello,” but it had filled him with terror, for it had brought home to him the jealousy that was gnawing at his heart, creeping into his bones. Delivered from sentimentality by his surrender to his own generous impulse, sanded over as he was by years of celibacy, he had day by day more swiftly yielded to this woman whom he had taken for his wife, and had arrived at a passion torn, knotted, and twisted by jealousy of that other whom he had never known, whose child now waxed in her womb and brought her to long periods of almost self-hypnotized inward pondering, so that, though she was all grace, all tenderness and gratitude toward him, she was never his, never, even in their most pleasant moments, anything but remote. The agonies through which he passed made him only the more determined to be gentle with her, and often when he took her hand and pressed it, and she gave him not the pressure in return forwhich he hoped and so longed, he would be unable to bear it and would go out and walk for miles and cry out upon the injustice of the world. And then he would think that perhaps she loved him, perhaps it was an even greater torture to her to have this other between them; surely if that were so it must be keener suffering for her since it was her doing and her folly and not his. And he would hate the stain upon her, give way before the violence of his hatred, and call her unworthy and long with a sick longing for purity, an ideal mating, the first kindling in both man and woman so that each could be all to the other, wholly, with never so much as a thought lost in the past, never so much as the smallest wear and usage of anterior desire. . . . He would persuade himself that she did not love him at all; that she and the old bawd had entrapped him by sordid and base cunning. And those were the worst hours of all. But when he was with her and she gave him her smile or some little sudden friendly caress he would feel comforted and very sure of her and of the future when they would both forget, and then both his hatred and his longing for a perfect world would fall away from him and he would see them as absurd projections of those contrasts which arise and haunt the half-comprehending mind. And he would tell himself that all would be well; that they would be happy in the child which would be his also, for the love he had for her. And his jealousy would return.Therefore he read “King Lear,” and the pity ofit purged him, though he was not without feeling that he, too, was cast out upon the barren places of the earth to face the storm and meet disaster. Feeling so he said to Matilda:“Money and material things seem to have nothing to do with life at all. Here am I with you, whom I love. . . .”“Do you?”“I love you.”“Thank you.”“With you, and no possible anxiety as to the future, and yet I seem to myself to be on the very brink of explosion and disaster.”“Dear man, I wish you wouldn’t think so much.”“I must think, or my feelings swamp me.”She thrilled him by taking his hand, and she said:“Do you know what I want?”“No. You shall have it.”“I want to make you happy.”That was the most definite assurance of her feeling for him she had as yet given him. It soothed his jealousy, made it easier for him to conquer it, but presently it laid him open to a new dread. The time for her confinement was drawing on, and he began to think that out, too; the violence and bloodiness of birth haunted him, the physical pain it entailed, the possibility of its being attended by death. She had promised him happiness, and she might die! He became over-scrupulous in his treatment of her and worried her about her health so that she lost her temper and said:“After all, it’s me that’s got to go through with it, andIdon’t think about it.”That brought him up sharp, and he held his peace and watched her. Truly she did not think about it. She accepted it. It was to her, it seemed, entirely a personal matter, perfectly in the order of things, to be worried through as occasion served. It might go well, or it might go ill, but meanwhile there were the things of the moment to be attended to and the day’s pleasure to be seized. He was humbled and a little envious of her. For a little while he indulged in an orgy of self-reproach, but she only laughed at him and told him that when she had so much cause for feeling depressed he might at least comfort her with the sight of a cheerful face. He laughed, too, and told himself he was a selfish ass and that she was made that way and he was made another, and that perhaps men and women are made so, men thinking and women accepting, or perhaps they only become so in the progress of their lives.Matilda’s baby came four months after their marriage. It was still-born.IIMARRIAGESie war liebenswürdig und er liebte sie: aber er war nicht liebenswürdig und sie liebte ihn nicht.IIMARRIAGEMATILDA kept her promise and made her husband happy. She reduced him to that condition wherein men and women believe that never has the world been visited by such love and that they will go on loving forever and ever. This she achieved by leaving his affections to look after themselves and concentrating all her energies on seeing that he was properly fed and clothed, had the requisite amount of sleep and just enough cosseting to make him wish for more, which he did not get. She left the ordering of their coexistence in his hands, and he, being happy, span a cocoon of charming fancies about it, and showed little disposition to change. Therefore they continued with Mr. Copas and became acquainted with the four quarters of England and the two or three kinds of towns which in vast numbers have grown on it, like warts on the face of Oliver Cromwell. Bemused by the romance of love and the sense of well-being that its gratification brings, he observed very little and thought less, and he did not perceive that he was falling into a routine as dispirited as that in which he had gone round and round out of adolescenceinto manhood and out of manhood into middle age. Such is the power of love—or rather of a certain very general over-indulged variant of it—that it can lift a man out of space and time and set him drifting and dreaming through a larger portion of his allotted span than he can afford to lose. As there is a sort of peace in this condition, it is highly prized: indeed, it passes for an ideal, being as material as a fatted pig into whose sides you can poke your finger, as into a cushion; it has the further merit that it needs no effort to attain, but only a fall and no struggle. Old Mole fell into it and prized it and told himself that life was very good. When he told his wife that life was very good she said that it was a matter of opinion and it depended what you happened to want.“What do you want?” he asked.She thumped her chest with the odd little teasing gesture that was perhaps most characteristic of her, and said:“Something big.”“Aren’t you content?”“Oh, yes. But I want to know, to find out.”He stretched his legs and, with a beautiful sense of enunciating wisdom, he remarked:“There is nothing to know, nothing to find out. Here are we, a man and a woman, fulfilling the destiny of men and women, and, for the rest, happy enough in the occupation to which circumstances and our several destinies and characters have brought us. I am perfectly happy, my dear, most surprisinglyhappy when I look back and consider all things. I have no ambition, no hopes, and, I fancy, no illusions; most happily of all, I have no politics. I did not make the world and I do not believe that I can undo anything good or evil which, for the world’s purposes, is necessary to be done. . . .”He had developed a habit of talking and did not know it. She had taken refuge in silence and was aware of it.Once she asked him if he did not feel the want of friends.“Friends?” he answered. “I want nothing while I have you.”She made no reply and he was left hurt, because he had expected appreciation of his entire devotion.She was happy, too, but more keenly than he, for she was a little dazed by her astounding luck, and behind her pleasure in him and his unfailing kindness and consideration lay the sting of uneasiness and the dread that the comfort of such charming days could not last. Ignorant, untaught, unprepared, love had been for her a kiss of the lips, a surrender to the flood of perilous feeling, a tampering with forces that might or might not sweep you to ruin: a matter of fancy, dalliance, and risk. She had fancied, dallied, dared, and when she had thought to be swept to ruin—and that swift descent also had had its sickening fascination—she had been tumbled into this security where love was solid,comfortable, omnipresent, and apparently all providing. She was perpetually amazed at her husband and chafed only against herself because she could not share his complacency. It was easy for her to assimilate his manners and to take the measure of his refinement. With talk of her brothers and sisters she would lead him on to tell of his family, and especially of the women among whom he had spent his boyhood, and she would contrast herself with them and rebel against everything in herself that was not harmonious with their atmosphere. And she found it increasingly difficult to get on with her aunt, Mrs. Copas.The new comic, John Lomas, was a great success. He was a fat little man in the fifties with a thorough knowledge of his business, which was to make any and every kind of audience laugh. A wonderful stock of tricks he had, tricks of voice, of limbs, of gesture, of facial expression, nothing but tricks, inexhaustible. He cared about nothing in the world but what he called “the laugh,” and when he got one he wanted another, and always had a quip or a leer or a cantrip to get it. But he was a rascal and a drunkard, and had lost all sense of the fitness of things and always went on too long until his audience was weary of him. Therefore he had come down and down until he found an appetite to feed that was gross enough to bear with his insistence. . . . He said—it may have been true—that he had played before the King of England, and he was full of stories of the theaters in London,the real nobby theaters where the swells paid half a guinea for a seat and brought their wives and other people’s wives in shining jewels and dresses cut low back and front. He had played in every kind of piece, from the old-fashioned kind of burlesque to melodrama, drama, and Shakespeare, and he had never had any luck, but had always been on the point of making a fortune. “Charley’s Aunt,” he said, had been offered to him, and he had taken an option, but at the last moment his backers failed him. “And look at the money that had made and was still making.” His first stage of intoxication was melancholy, and then he would weep over the mess he had made of his life and grow maudlin and tell how badly he had treated the dear little woman who had been his wife so that she had left him and gone off with a bloody journalist. When that mood passed he would grow excited and blustering, and brag of the slap-up women he had had when he was making his thirty pounds a week. His most intimate confessions were reserved for Matilda, for he despised Copas because he had never known anything better than a fit-up. And of Mr. Mole he was rather scared.“I don’t know,” he would say to Matilda. “I don’t know what it is, but your guv’nor ain’t one of us, is he now?”And when Matilda agreed that Mr. Mole was different he called her a silly cuckoo for not making him take her to London and the Continong to have a high old time.He could play the piano in a fumbling fashion, and he used to sing through the scores of some of the old pieces he had been in, with reminiscences of the players who had been successful in them and full histories of their ups and downs and their not unblemished lives, all with a full-throated sentimentality that made every tale as he told it romantic and charming. Broken and rejected by it as he was, he worshiped the theater and gloried in it, and the smell of the grease paint was to him as the smell of the field to a Jewish patriarch.One day he insisted that Matilda should sing, and he taught her one of the old coon songs that had haunted London in the days of his prosperity. At first she was shy and sang only from her throat, and he banged out the accompaniment and drowned her voice and told her that really no one would hear her but the conductor. She must sing so that she could feel as if her voice was a little bigger than herself. The phrase seized her imagination, and she tried again. This time she produced a few full notes and then had no breath left to compass the rest. However, he was satisfied, and said she’d do for the chorus all right.“And some of those gels, mark you,” he said, “do very well for themselves, in the way of marriage, and out of it.”He taught her to dance, said she had just the feet for it. “Not real slap-up dancing, of course, but the sort you get in any old London show; the sort that’s good enough with all the rest—and you’vegot that all right, my dear—and not a bit of good without it.”The development of these small accomplishments gave her a very full pleasure, greater confidence in herself, and a feeling of independence. She took a naïve and childish pride in her body from which these wonders came. They gave her far keener delight than “the acting” had ever done, but she never connected them with her ambition. They were a purely personal secret treasure, an inmost chamber whither she could retire and let go, and be expansively, irresponsibly herself.Toward the end of the first year of their marriage, in the harsh months of the close of the year, they were for six weeks in a city that sprawled and tumbled over the huge moors of Yorkshire. It rained almost continuously, and it was very cold, but in that city, which almost less than any other of the industrial purgatories of the kingdom appreciates art and the things of the mind, they prospered. John Lomas got his fill of laughter, and, the kinematograph being no new thing there, the theater weathered that competition.Matilda wrote to her sister, Mrs. Boothroyd, whose husband was employed at the municipal gasworks, and sent her a pass. She gave her news: how she was married and happy and enjoying her work with her uncle. The Boothroyd family only knew of Matilda’s disaster and nothing of her subsequent history. Mr. Boothroyd, who was a deaconat his chapel, forbade his wife to take any notice of the letter, and she obeyed him, but, when he was on the night shift at the works, she made use of the pass.The program consisted of Mr. Mole’s “Iphigenia,” and a farce introduced into the repertory by John Lomas from what he could remember of a successful venture at the old Strand Theater in London. Matilda appeared in both pieces. She was so successful that Mrs. Boothroyd, who sat in the front row, swelled with pride, and, as she clapped her hands, turned to her neighbor:“Isn’t she good? And so pretty, too! Whoever would have thought it? But there always was something about her. She’s my sister, you know.”“Indeed? Then I am pleased to meet you. She is my wife.”“Well, I never! . . .”Mrs. Boothroyd seized Old Mole by the hand and shook it warmly, while she giggled with excitement. She bore a faint resemblance to Matilda, but looked worn, had that pathetic, punctured appearance which comes from overmuch child-bearing. Throughout the rest of the performance she only glanced occasionally at the stage and devoted her attention to scanning her brother-in-law’s appearance. At the close of the second piece she said:“Iamglad. It would never ha’ done for her to ’ave a young ’usband. She was always the flighty one.”This sounded ominously to Old Mole, who for more than a year now had been young with Matilda’s youth, and so comfortably accustomed to it that he never dared in thought dissever himself from her. He rejoined that his sister-in-law would be glad to know that Matilda was settled down.They went behind and found her hot and flustered, painted, and half out of the gipsy dress in which she had made her last appearance. When she saw Mrs. Boothroyd she gave a cry of delight, rushed to her and flung her arms round her neck and kissed her.“Didn’t Jimmy come, too?”“No; Jimmy was at the works, and couldn’t come.”Matilda asked after all the Boothroyd children and her own brothers and sisters, and all their illnesses and minor disasters were retailed. Mr. and Mrs. Copas came in and embraced Bertha Boothroyd, whom they had not seen since she was a little girl, and when she said how proud she was of Matilda they replied that she had every reason to be. John Lomas appeared with stout and biscuits, and the occasion was celebrated. Warmed by this conviviality, Mrs. Boothroyd invited them all to tea with her on the next day but one, then, alarmed at the thought of what she had done, gave a little frightened gasp, was pale and silent for a few moments, and at last said she must be home to give Jim his supper when he came back.She kissed and was kissed. Her disquietude had blown the high spirits of the party. When she had gone Matilda said:“Jim’s a devil. Bertha’s had a baby every year since she was married, and he thinks of nothing but saving his own soul.”Next day came a note from Bertha saying she was afraid her little house would not accommodate the whole party, but would Matilda bring her husband. “Is Mr. Mole an actor?” she asked. “I told Jim he wasn’t.”Bertha’s address was 33 June Street. It was a long journey by tram, and then Matilda and her husband had to walk nearly a mile down a monotonous road intersected with little streets. The name of the road was Pretoria Avenue, and on one side the little streets were called after the months of the year, and on the other after the twelve Apostles. The Boothroyds therefore lived in the very heart of the product of the end of the nineteenth century. Their front door opened straight on to the street, they had a little yard at the back, and their house consisted of eight rooms. The parlor door was unlocked for the visit, and, amid photographs of many Boothroyds, testimonials to the worthiness of James Boothroyd and his Oddfellows’ certificate, tea was laid, none of your proper Yorkshire teas, but afternoon tea with thin bread and butter. Five little Boothroyds in clean collars and pinafores wereplaced round the room, and stared alternately at the cake on the table and their aunt and their new uncle. Old Mole endeavored to avoid their gaze, but the room seemed full of round staring gray eyes, and when he considered the corpulent American organ that took up the whole wall opposite the fireplace, he was astonished that so many people could be crammed into so small a space. Then he estimated that there were at least sixty other exactly similar houses in the street, that from January to December there were streets in replica, not to mention those on the other side of the road which were named from John to—surely not to Judas? He remembered then that one street was called Paul Street. . . . Dozens and dozens of houses, each with its Boothroyd family and its American organ. Dejectedly he told himself that these were the poor, until, glancing across at Matilda, he remembered that it was from such a house, among dozens of such houses, that she had come. That thought colored his survey, and he reminded himself, as nearly always he was forced to do when considering her actions or any episode in her history, that his own comfortable middle-class standards were not at all proper to the consideration of the phenomena of mean streets. Desperately anxious to make himself pleasant to Matilda’s sister, he asked heavily:“Are these all——?”She was in such a flutter that she did not leave him time to finish his sentence, took him to be referringto the children, and said: “Yes, they were all hers, and there were two more in the kitchen.”With more tact Matilda cut the cake and gave a piece to each of the five children. Mrs. Boothroyd said she was spoiling them, and Matilda retorted:“If they’re good children you can’t spoil them.”And the children giggled crumbily and presently they sidled and edged up to their aunt and began to finger her and pluck at her clothes. Seeing his wife so set Old Mole off on an entirely new train of thought and feeling, and he began to contrast the Copas atmosphere with this domestic interior. Very queerly it gave a sort of life to that crusted old formula that had, with so many others, gone by the board in his eruption from secondary education, wherein it was laid down that a woman’s place is her home. He could never, without discomfort, apply any formula to Matilda, but to see her there, with the bloom on her, in her full beauty, with the five little children at her knees, made this idea so attractive that he was loath to relinquish it: nor did he do so until Matilda asked if she might see the house, when she and Mrs. Boothroyd and the five children left him alone with the ruins of the cake and the American organ.He was profoundly uneasy. He had not exactly idealized the Copas theater and all its doings, but he had come to them on the crest of a violent wave of reaction and had been apt to set them against and above everything in the world that was solid and stolid and workaday. It had been enchantedfor him by Matilda, and she had in June Street set an even more potent spell upon him and wafted him not into any kingdom of the imagination, but into the warm heart of life itself. In the Copas world he had made no allowance for children: in June Street, in dull industrial respectability, children were paramount. They surrounded Matilda and set him, in his slow fashion, tingling to the marvel of her. His response to this miracle took the form of a desire to open his pockets to the children. He took out a handful of money, and had selected five shillings when the door opened and a man entered, a dark, white-faced, thin-lipped man, with dirty hands and an aggressive jut of the shoulders.“Ye’ve been tea-partying, I see,” said the man.Old Mole explained his identity. The man put his head out of the door and yelled to his wife. She returned with Matilda, but the children did not come. James Boothroyd ignored the visitors to his house and said to his cowering wife:“You’ll clean up yon litter an’ you’ll lock t’door. What’ll neighbors say of us? I don’t know these folk. You’ll lock t’door and then you’ll gi’ me me tea in t’kitchen.”There was no sign of anger in the man. He had taken in the situation at a glance and was concerned only to bring it to the issue he desired. His relations by marriage were spotted by a world which he shunned as darkest Hell, and he would have none of them.With as much dignity as he could muster, Old Mole led his wife out into June Street. He was filled only with pity for Bertha.Said Matilda: “Didn’t I tell you he was a devil?”Later in their lodging he asked her:“Are all the men in those streets like that?”“If they’re religious, they’re like that. If they’re not religious they’re drunk. If they’re not drunk you never know when they’re going to leave you. That’s the sort of life I came out of and that’s the sort of life I’m never going back into if I can help it.”“You won’t need to, my dear.”“You never know.”With which disquieting assurance he was left to reflect that she seemed to have been as much upset by her visit to June Street as himself. He was tormented by a vision of England, this little isle, the home of heroes and great men, groaning beneath the weight of miles of such streets and sinking under the tread of millions of men like James Boothroyd. Lustily he strove for a cool, intellectual consideration of it all, a point from which the network of the meanish streets of the cities of England could be seen as justifiable, necessary, and unto their own ends sufficient, but, seen from the Copas world, they were repulsive and harsh; viewed through Matilda they were touched with magic.They were both unsettled and passed through days of irritation when they came perilously near toquarreling. In the end they made it up and found that they had conquered new territory for intimacy. On that territory they discussed their marriage, and he told her that he would like her to have a child. She burst into tears, and confessed that after her calamity the doctor had told her it was very improbable she ever would. He was for so long silent on that, being numbed by the sudden chill at his heart, that she took alarm and came and knelt at his side and implored him to forgive her, and said that if he did not she would go out on to the railway or into the canal. Then he, too, wept, and they held each other close and sobbed out that the world was very, very cruel, but they must be all in all to each other. And he said they would go away and settle down in some pretty place and live quietly and happily together right away from towns and theaters and everything. She shook her head, and, with the tears streaming down her cheeks, she said: No, she did not want to be a lady; at least, not that sort of a lady. He made many suggestions, but always her mind flew ahead of his, and she had constructed some horrid sort of a picture of the existence it would entail. At last he gave it up and said he supposed if there was to be a change it would come of its own accord.It came.Mrs. Copas, quite suddenly and for no apparent reason, decided that she was middle-aged, entirely altered her style of dressing and doing her hair,and, as the outward and visible sign of the advent of her maturity, set her heart on a black silk gown. She cajoled and teased and bullied her husband, but in vain. He was replenishing the theatrical wardrobe and could not be led to take any interest in hers. She pursued Mr. Mole with hints and flattery, but he could not or would not see her purpose. He had decided that Matilda should be dressed in a style more befitting his wife than she had adopted heretofore, and was spending many happy and weary hours in the shops patronized by the wives of clerks and well-to-do tradespeople. Incidentally he discovered a great deal about what women wear and its powerful influence over their whole being. In her new clothes Matilda was more dignified, more handsome, more certain of herself, and she gained in grace. . . . Mrs. Copas took to haunting their lodgings and was nearly always there when a new hat or a new jacket came home from the shops. She would insist on Matilda’s trying them on, and would go into loud ecstatic praise and long reminiscences of the fine garments she had had when she was a young woman, and Mr. Copas was the most attentive husband in the world.An old peacock without its tail is a sorry sight, and the young birds scorn him. Matilda did not exactly scorn her aunt, but her continued presence was an irritant. She was not yet at her ease in the possession of many fine clothes and was entirely set on gaining the mastery of them and of the accession of personality they brought. Mrs. Copas wasa clog upon this desire, and therefore when, after many hints and references, she came suddenly to the point and asked pointblank for a loan of four pounds wherewith to buy a black silk gown, Matilda flushed with anger and exasperation and replied curtly that her husband was not made of money.“No, dearie, I know, but I’d so set my heart on a black silk gown.”And the towsled old creature looked so pathetic and disappointed that Matilda was on the point of yielding; but indeed she was really alarmed at the amount of money that had been spent—more than twenty pounds—and she followed up her reply with a firm No.Mrs. Copas took it ill, and set herself to making things unpleasant for Mr. Mole and his wife. She had control of affairs behind scenes and also of the commissariat, and it was not long before she had provoked a quarrel. Matilda told her she was a disagreeable old woman; to which she hit back with:“Some women don’t care how they get husbands.”Following on that there was such a sparring and snarling that in the end Mr. Copas declared that his theater was not big enough for the two of them, and that Matilda must either eat her words and beg her aunt’s pardon or go. As the most injurious insults had come from her aunt, Matilda kicked against the injustice of this decree and flounced away. She said nothing to her husband of what had taken place. They were at the beginning of December, and already the hoardings of the townwere covered with announcements of the approaching annual pantomime at the principal theater, together with the names of the distinguished artistes engaged. Matilda dressed herself in her very smartest and for the first time donned the musquash toque, tippet and muff she had been given. They were the first furs she had ever possessed, and she felt so grand in them that she was shy of wearing them. When she had walked along several streets and seen herself in a shop window or two, they gave her courage for her purpose, and she told herself that she was, after all, as good as anyone else who might be wanting to do the work, set her chin in the air, went to the theater, and asked to see the manager. The doorkeeper had instructions not to turn away anything that looked promising and only to reject those who looked more than thirty-five and obviously had no chance of looking pretty even behind the footlights. He did not reject Matilda. She was shown into the manager’s presence, stated her wishes and accomplishments and experience. The manager did not invite her either to sing or to dance, but asked her if she minded what she wore. She had seen pantomimes in Thrigsby, and she said she did not mind.“All right, my dear,” said the manager, who was good looking, young, but pale and weary in expression. And Matilda found herself engaged for the chorus at one pound a week.She told Lomas first, and he was delighted. When it came to her husband she found it rather difficultto tell him, was half afraid that he would forbid her to pursue the adventure, and half ashamed, after his great kindness, of having acted without consulting him. However, she was determined to go on with it and to uproot him from the Copas theater. She began by telling him of her quarrel with her aunt.“I thought that was bound to happen,” he said.“Yes. It came to that that uncle said I must go. What do you think I’ve done?”“Bought a new dress?”“No. Better than that.”“Made friends with the Lord Mayor?”“Funny! No.”“What have you done, then?”“I’ve got an engagement at the theater, the real, big theater where they have a proper stage, and a stage door and a box office, and a manager who wears evening dress.”“Indeed? And for how long?”“It may be for ten weeks and it may be for thirteen. It was fifteen last year.”“And what am I to do?”She had not thought about him and was nonplussed. However, he needed very little cajoling before he gave his consent to her plan, and she told him that if he got bored he could easily go away by himself and come back when he wasn’t bored any longer. Inwardly he felt that the difficulty was not going to be so easily settled as all that, but he was on the whole relieved to be rid of Mr. Copas,who had arranged to move on as soon as the pantomime opened to the distraction of the public and the devastation of his business. When Mr. Mole announced his intention of remaining the actor was affronted and refused to speak to him again. Matilda said, a little maliciously, that he was afraid of being asked for the money he owed them, and that was her parting shot after Mrs. Copas, who got her own back with the loud sneer in Mr. Mole’s presence:“There’s not many married women would wear tights and not many husbands would let ’em.”Old Mole gasped, and looked forward with dread to the first performance of the pantomime. He was spared the indignity of tights, for the fifty women in the chorus were divided into “girls” and “boys,” in accordance with their size, and Matilda was a “girl.” She took her work very seriously, put far more energy into it than she had ever done into “Iphigenia” or “Josephine.” The theater, one of the largest in England, awed her by the size of its machinery, and she was excited and impressed by all the talk and gossip she heard of the doings of the theaters and the halls. She disliked most of her colleagues in the chorus, and of the principals only one was not too exalted to take notice of her. This was a young actor named, professionally, Carlton Timmis (pronounced Timms), who played the Demon King. He was very attentive and kind to her, and when she asked if she might introduce him to her husband he was obviously dismayed, but expressedhimself as delighted. He was a rather beautiful young man and very romantic, and he and Old Mole found much to talk of together.“You can’t think,” said Timmis, “what a relief it is to meet a man with a soul. Among all those idiots one is parched, withered, dried up.”And much the same thought was in Old Mole’s mind. Looking back he was astonished that he could for so long have tolerated the unintelligent society in which he had been cast. Timmis had decided, if erratic, opinions, and he loved nothing better than gloomily to grope after philosophical conceptions. Being very young and unsuccessful, he was pessimistic and clutched eagerly at everything which encouraged him in his belief in a world blindly responding to some mysterious law of destruction. Old Mole was inclined toward optimistic Deism and materialism, and they struck sparks out of each other, Timmis moving in a whirl of nebulous ideas, and his interlocutor moving so slowly that, by contrast, he seemed almost rigid.“Take myself,” Timmis would say. “Can there be any sense in a world which condemns me to play the Demon King in an idiotic pantomime, or indeed in a world which demands, indulges, encourages, delights in such driveling nonsense as that same pantomime?”“There is room for everything in the world, which is very large,” replied Old Mole.“Then why are men starved, physically, morally and spiritually?”“The universe,” came the reply, between two long puffs of a cigar, “was not made for man, but man was made for the universe.”(This was an impromptu, but Old Mole often recurred to it, and indeed declared that his philosophy dated from that day and that utterance.)“But why was the universe made?”“Certainly not from human motives and not in terms of human understanding. To hear you talk one would think the whole creation was in a state of decomposition.”“So it is. That is its motive force, an irresistible rotting away into nothing. I don’t believe anything but decomposition could produce that pantomime.”“The pantomime is so small a thing that I think it impossible for it to be visibly affected by any universal process. It is simply a human contrivance for the amusement of human beings, and you must admit that it succeeds in its purpose.”“It has no purpose. It succeeds in spite of its stupidity by sheer force of the amiable cleverness of an overpaid buffoon and the charm and physical attractions of two or three young women.”Old Mole was forced to admit the justice of this criticism, and to drive it home Timmis recited the eight lines with which in the cave scene he introduced the ballet:Now Sinbad’s wrecked and nearly drowned, you see.He thinks he’s saved, but has to deal with me.I’ll wreck him yet and rack his soul as well—A shipwrecked sailor suits my purpose fell.I’ll catch his soul and make it mine for ayeAnd he’ll be sorry he ever stepped this way.But who comes here to brave my cave’s dark night?Aha! Oh, curse! It is the Fairy Light.Matilda had been listening to them, and she said:“Doesn’t she look lovely when she comes on all in white? Such a pretty voice she has, too.”“You like the pantomime, my dear?”“Oh, yes!”“Could you say why?”“It’s pretty and gay, and it’s wonderful to hear the people in that great big place laughing and singing the choruses.”“You see, Timmis, the pantomime has justified its existence.”“But what on earth has it got to do with Sinbad?”“Nothing. Why should it? Sinbad is an Eastern tale. The pantomime is an English institution. It reflects the English character. It is heavy, solid, gross, over-colored, disconnected, illogical and unimaginative. On the other hand, it is humorous, discreetly sensual, varied and full of physical activity. It affords plenty to listen to and nothing to hear, plenty to look at and nothing to see, and it is like one of those Christmas puddings which quickly make the body feel overfed and provide it with no food.”“Anyhow,” said Matilda, “it’s a great success, and they say it will run until after Easter.”It did so: the tunes in it were whistled and sung in the streets, the comedians’ gags became catchwords, the principal buffoon kicked off at a charity football match, and, upon inquiry, Old Mole found that clerks, schoolboys and students visited the theater once a week, and that among the young sparks of the town, sons of mill-owners and ironmasters, there was considerable competition for the favors of the chorus ladies. Some of these phenomena he remembered having observed in Thrigsby, and at least one of his old pupils had come to grief through a lady of the chorus and been expelled by his affrighted family to the Colonies. By the end of the fifth week he was thoroughly sick of it all, and he began to agree with Timmis that the success of the show was very far from justifying it. It was so completely lacking in character as to be demoralizing. His third visit left him clogged and thick-witted, as though he had been breathing stale air. It was a poison: and if it were so for him, what (he asked himself) must it be for young minds and spirits? . . . And yet Matilda throve in it. She liked the work and she now liked the company, who, being prosperous, were amiable, and they liked her. Most of all, she loved the independence, the passage from the solid, safe, warmly tender atmosphere with which her husband surrounded her to the heat, the rush and the excitement of the theater. When he left her at the stagedoor she would give a shrug of the shoulders that was almost a shake, give him a swift parting smile that he always felt might have been given to a stranger, and with a quick gladness dart through into the lighted passage. . . . Before many weeks had passed she had letters, flowers, presents, from unknown admirers. He asked Timmis if there was any harm in them, and the actor replied that it was the usual thing, that women had to look after themselves in the theater, and that these attentions pleased the management. They pleased Matilda: she laughed at the letters, decorated their rooms with the flowers, and left the presents with the stage doorkeeper, who annexed them. Old Mole definitely decided that he disliked the whole business and began to think enviously of James Boothroyd, who was religious and a devil, but did at least have his own way in his own house. To achieve that the first thing necessary was to have a house, and he half resolved to return to his old profession—not considering himself to be fit for any other. But he never rounded the resolution and he never broached his thoughts to Matilda. He told himself that by Easter it would be all over and they would go away, perhaps abroad, see the world. . . . Then he realized that apart from Matilda he had no desires whatever, that his affections were entirely engaged in her, and that, further, he was spasmodically whirled off his feet in a desire that was altogether independent of his will, obedient only to some profound logic either of his own character or of theworld outside him, to mark and consider the ways of men. Rather painfully he was aware of being detached from himself, and sometimes in the street, in a tram, he would pull himself up with a start and say to himself:“I don’t seem to be caring what happens to me. I seem to be altogether indifferent to whatever I am doing, to have no sort of purpose, while all these men and women round me are moving on with very definite aims.”Deliberately he made the acquaintance of men teaching in the little university of the place and in its grammar school. He saw himself in them. He could talk their language, but whereas to them their terms were precise and important, to him they were nothing but jargon. . . . No: into that squirrel cage he would not go again. They seemed happy enough and pleased with themselves, but, whereas he could enter fully into their minds, the new regions that he had conquered for himself were closed to them. They complained, as he had done in Thrigsby, of the materialism of their city, and in moments of enthusiasm talked of the great things they could do for the younger generation, the future citizens of the Empire, if only some of the oozing wealth of the manufacturers could be diverted to their uses. But the city had its own life, and they were no more a part of it than he had been of Thrigsby. . . . When they had cured him of his discontent he was done with them, and took refuge in books. He bought in a great store ofthem and fumbled about in them for the threads of philosophy he was seeking. He procured stimulation, but very little satisfaction, and he was driven to the streets and the public places. Very secret was the life of that city. Its trades were innumerable. Everything was manufactured in it from steel to custard powder. It owed its existence to the neighboring coalfields, its organization to a single family of bankers whose interests were everywhere, in almost every trade, in the land, in the houses, in the factories, in the supply of water and lighting, and everywhere their interests were trebly safeguarded. The city lived only for the creation of wealth and by it. With the distribution of wealth and the uses it was put to it had no concern; nor had its citizens time to consider them. Their whole energies were absorbed in keeping their place in the markets of the world, and they were too exhausted for real pleasure or domestic happiness. When Old Mole considered the life of that city by and large, James Boothroyd appeared to him as its perfect type. And yet he retained his optimism, telling himself that all this furious energy was going to the forging of the city of the future.“The bees,” he said, “build the combs in their hives, the ants the galleries in their hills, and men their sprawling cities, and to everything under the sun there is a purpose. Let me not make the mistake of judging the whole—which I cannot see—by the part.”He had reached this amiable conclusion whenCarlton Timmis entered his room, sat down by the table and laid a bulky quarto envelope on it. He was agitated, declined the proffered cigar, and broke at once into the following remarkable oration:“Mr. Mole, you are one of the few men I have ever met who can do nothing with dignity and without degradation. Therefore I have come to you in my distress to make a somewhat remarkable request. And it is due to you and to myself to make some explanation.”He seemed so much in earnest, almost hysterical, and his great eyes were blazing with such a fervor that Old Mole could not but listen.“My real name,” said Timmis, “is Cuthbert Jones. My father is a small shopkeeper in Leicestershire. He is a man, so far as I can discover, devoid of feeling, but with a taste for literature and—God knows why, at this time of day!—the philosophy of the Edinburgh school. He had a cruel sense of humor and he made my mother very unhappy. He encouraged me to read, to write, to think, to be pleased with my own thoughts. It amused him, I fancy, to see me blown out with my own conceit, so that he might have the pleasure of pricking my bladder-head and then distending it again. For weeks together I would have his praise, and then nothing but the most bitter gibes. I had either to cling to my conceit to keep my head above water or sink into the depths of misery and self-distrust. I devoured the lives of illustrious menand attributed their fame to those qualities in them which I was able to find in myself. I sought solitude, avoided companions of my own age, and I was always desperately, wretchedly in love with some one or other. I really believed myself to be a genius, or rather I used to count over my symptoms and decide one day that I was, the next that I was not. All this roused my father to such a malicious delight, and with his teasing he made my life so intolerable that at last I could stand it no longer, and I ran away. I walked to London, and then, after applying in vain for work at the newspaper offices, I obtained a situation in a theater as a call boy. I could not possibly live on what I earned, and should have been in a bad way but for a kind creature, a dresser, who lodged me in her house, took my wages in return, and allowed me pocket money and money for my clothes. I wrote to my father and received an extraordinary letter in which he applauded my action and expressed his belief that nothing could prevent a man of genius from coming to the top. ‘It is as impossible to keep a bad man up as to keep a good man down,’ he said. I have neither gone down nor up, Mr. Mole. As I have grown older I have slipped into one precarious employment after another. No one pays any attention to me, no one, except yourself, has ever troubled to discover my thoughts on any subject, and often, when I have been inclined to think myself the most miserable of men, I have found correction in the memory of my boyish belief in my genius. . . . Such changes of fortuneas I have had have come to me through women. All the kindness I ever received came through them, and every disaster that has crushed me has arisen through my inability to stop myself from falling in love with them. . . . You will understand what I mean when I talk of the life of the mind. That life has always been with me, and it has perhaps been my only real life. I have had great adventures in it. I have aimed and wrestled and struggled toward a goal that has many times seemed to me immediately attainable.”He paused and brushed back his hair, and his eyes set into an expression of extraordinary wistful longing and into his voice came a sweetness most musical and moving.“There is, I believe, a condition within the reach of all men wherein the selfish self is shed, the barrier broken down between a man and his vision and purpose, so that his whole force can be concentrated upon his object and his every deed and every thought becomes an act of love. I have many a time come within reach of this condition, but always just when I seemed most sure I have toppled over head and ears in love with some woman, whom in a very short space of time I despised and detested. When I met you I was uplifted and exalted and come nearer to my goal than ever before, and now, more fatuously, more idiotically than ever, I am in love. . . . I give it up. I am forced to the conclusion that I am one of those unhappy beings who are condemned to live between one state and the other, tobe neither a slave bent on eating, drinking, sleeping and the grosser pleasures, nor a free man satisfying his every lust and every desire, by the way, only the more sturdily and mightily to go marching on with the great army of friends, lovers and comrades. . . . In short, Mr. Mole, I am done for.”“Well, well.” Old Mole was aware of the entire inadequacy of this either as comment or as consolation, but he was baffled by the self-absorption which had gone to the making of this elaborate analysis: and yet he had been stirred by the Demon King’s vision of the possibilities of human nature and roused by the words “every deed and every thought an act of love.” There was a platonic golden idealism about it that lifted him back into his own youth, his own always comfortable dreams, and, contrasting himself with Timmis (or Jones), he saw how immune his early years had been from suffering. Timmis might be done for, but if anyone was to blame it was his malicious, erratic father. Then, with his mind taking a wide sweep, he saw that there could be no question of blame or of attaching it, since that father had also had a father who perhaps suffered from something worse than Edinburgh philosophy. There could be no question of blame. The world was so constructed that Timmis (or Jones) was bound to be out of luck and to fail, just as it seemed to be in the order of creation that he himself, H. J. Beenham, should be comfortable and beyond the reach of the cares most common to mankind. There were fat kine and leankine, and, come what may, the lean kine would still light upon the meager pasture.There be fat men and lean men, but men have this advantage over kine, that they can understand and help each other.So Old Mole nursed his knee and told himself that Timmis was obviously sincere in believing himself to be done for, and therefore for all practical purposes he was done for, and there was no other useful course to pursue than to listen to what further he might have to say, and then, from his point of view, to consider the position and see if there were not something he had overlooked in his excited despair.Timmis concluded his tale, and nothing had escaped him. His own opinion of his moral condition must be accepted: as to his material state, that could not possibly be worse. He had loved, wooed and won a lady in the chorus upon whom the manager had cast a favorable eye and the light of his patronage. There had been a scene, an altercation, almost blows. Timmis’s engagement ceased on the spot, and, as he said, he now understood why actors put up with so much insult, insolence and browbeating on the part of their managers. He had three shillings in his pocket with which to pay his rent and face the world, and he was filled with disgust of women, of the theater, of himself, and would Mr. Mole be so kind as to lend him fifty pounds with which to make a new start in a new country; he believed that in fresh surroundings, thousandsof miles away from any philosophy or poetry, or so-called art, he could descend to a lower level of existence, and perhaps, without the intervention of another disastrous love affair, redeem his false start. He was not, he said, asking for something for nothing—no man born and bred in England could ever bring himself to ask for or to expect that!—he was prepared to give security of a sort which only a man of intelligence and knowledge of affairs would accept. He had brought a play with him in typescript. It was called “Lossie Loses.” In his time Timmis had written many plays, and they were all worthless except this one. Most of them were good in intention but bad in performance: he had burned them. This was bad in intention but good in execution, and one of these days it would become a considerable property. An agent in London had a copy, he said, and he would write to this man and tell him that he had transferred all his rights to Mr. Mole. He then produced a pompous little agreement assigning his property and stating the consideration, wrote his name on it with a large flourishing hand, and passed it over with the play to his friend in need. After a moment’s hesitation, during which he squashed his desire to improve the occasion with a few general remarks, Old Mole thought of the unlucky creature’s three shillings and of the deliverance that fifty pounds would be to him, and at once produced his checkbook and wrote out a check.No man has yet discovered the art of taking a check gracefully. Timmis shuffled it into his pocket,hemmed and ha’d for a few seconds, and then bolted.Old Mole took up his play and began to read it. It did not interest him, but he could not put it down. There was not a true emotion in it, not a reasonable man or woman, but it was full of surprising tricks and turns and quiddities, was perpetually slopping over from sugary tenderness to shy laughter, and all the false emotions in it were introduced so irrelevantly as never to be thoroughly cloying, and indeed sometimes to give almost that sensation of delighted surprise which comes truly only from the purest and happiest art. Not until it was some moments out of his hands did Old Mole recognize the thing in all its horrid spuriousness. Then he flung it from him, scowled at it, fumed over it, and finally put it away and resolved to think no more about it or of Carlton Timmis.That night when he met Matilda she was in high delight. The “second girl” was ill; her understudy had been called away to the sick bed of her only surviving aunt, and she had been chosen to play the part at a matinée to see if she could do it. Her name would not be on the program, but she would have ten lines to speak and one verse in a quartet to sing, and a dance with the third comedian. Wasn’t it splendid? And couldn’t they go and have supper at the new hotel just to celebrate it? All the girls were talking about the hotel, and she had never been to a real restaurant.It is hard not to feel generous when you havegiven away fifty pounds, and Old Mole yielded. They had oysters and grilled kidneys, and they drank champagne. Matilda had never tasted it before and she made a little ceremony of it. It was so pretty (she said), such a lovely color, and the bubbles were so funnily busy. He drank too much of it and became amorous. Matilda was wonderfully pretty and amusing in her excitement, and he could not take his eyes off her.“Tell me,” he said, “do you really like this life?”“I love it. It’s something like what I’ve always wanted to be. In some ways it’s better and some ways it’s worse.”“I don’t see much of you now.”“You like me all the better when you do see me.”“We’re not getting on much with your education.”“Education be blowed.”He was distressed and wished she had not said “be blowed.” She saw his discomfort and leaned forward and patted his hand.“Don’t you fret, my dear. There’s a good time coming.”But unaccountably he was depressed. He was feeling sorry he had brought her. There was a vulgarity, a sensuousness in the glitter and gilt of the restaurant that sorted ill with what in his heart he felt and was proud to feel for Matilda. He was sorry that she liked it, but saw, too, that she could not help but be pleased since to her it was all noveland dazzling. Hardest of all to bear, he was forced to admit that he had no immediate alternative to lay before her.They drove home in a taxi, and she caressed him and soothed him and told him he was the dearest, kindest, gentlest and most considering husband any girl could have the luck to find. And once again, ominously, he was struck by the strangeness of the word husband on her lips. For a short while he was haunted by the figure of Timmis, with his disgust of women even while he loved one of them. But he shook away from that and told himself that if there was something lacking in his relations with his wife the fault must lie with him, for he at least had a certain scale of spiritual values, while she had none, nor, from her upbringing, could she have had the opportunity of discovering any in herself or her relations with those about her.She said he thought too much, but without thought, without passionate endeavor, how could marriage fail to sink into brutish habit? Was that too fastidious? Since there is an animal element in human life, were it not as well to deal with it frankly and healthily on an animal level? That offended his logic. There could be no element in life that was not harmonious with every other element. The gross indulgence of sex had always been offensive to him, a stupid protraction of the heated imprisonment of adolescence, a calamity that must result in arrested development. Marriage had forced him to think about these things, and he was determined,so far as in him lay, to think about them clearly, without dragging in literature, or sentiment, or prejudice. In marriage, admittedly, lay the highest spiritual relationship known, or ever to be known, to human beings. In marriage, obviously, the body had its share. If the body’s share were regarded as separate from the rest, as an unfortunate but not unpleasant necessity, then, being separate, how could it be anything but a clog upon the full and true union? It was impossible for him to think of sex as a clot in the otherwise free mating of souls, and, indeed, his experience assured him that the exercise of his sex gave him not only the most wonderful deliverance from physical obsessions, but also from the uneasy and unprofitable brooding of the mind.But he was uneasy and anxious in his marriage, came to believe that it was because his wife was content with so little when he desired to give her so much more, and blamed himself for his apparent inability to set forth his gift of emotion and human fellowship in terms that she could understand.He went to see her play her part in the pantomime and suffered agonies of nervousness for her. She delivered her ten lines without mishap, sang her part in the quartet inaudibly, and her dance in the duet was applauded so loudly that at last the conductor tapped his little desk, and Matilda came tripping forth again with her comedian, bowed, kissed her hand, and went through the movements—absurd, banal, pointless as they were—with a shygrace and a breathless, childish pleasure that were charming. He was swept into the collective pleasure of the audience and clapped his hands with them and felt that the Matilda there on the stage was not his Matilda, but a creature belonging to another world, of whose existence he was aware, while nothing in his world could have any influence or any bearing on her whatsoever. . . . He would meet her at the stagedoor, and she would be his Matilda, while the other remained behind, as it were, inanimate in her charmed existence. Both were infused with life from the same source of life; the essence passed from one to the other, and therefore there was not one Matilda but three Matildas.He lost himself in this mystic conception and was timely rescued by her meeting him as he passed through the vestibule. She took his arm and hugged it and asked him if he liked it.“Wasn’t it good getting an encore? That dance has only been encored six times before.”He told her how nervous he had been.“I wasn’t a bit nervous once I was on, but in the wings it was awful.”She said she wanted to take him behind the scenes so that he could see what a real theater was like. They passed through the stagedoor and along narrow, dusty passages, up steep flights of stone stairs, she chatting gaily in spite of the frequent notices enjoining silence, and every now and then they were stopped and Matilda was embraced by male and female alike, and all the women said how glad theywere, and the men said: “good egg” or “top hole.” Suddenly out of the narrow, dusty ways they came upon the stage, huge and eerie. There was only a faint light, the curtain was up, and there were tiny women in the auditorium dropping white cloths from the galleries and shrouding all the seats. Never had Old Mole had such a sense of emptiness and desolation. A man’s voice came from far up above the stage, and it sounded like a thin ghostly mocking. There was a creaking and a rasping, and a great sheet of painted canvas descended, the wings were set in place, and a flight of stairs was wheeled up and clamped: the scene was set for the opening of the pantomime. Suddenly the lights were turned on. Matilda began to hum the opening bars of the overture. Old Mole blinked. He was nearly blinded. The colors in the scenery glowed in the light. He had the most alarming sense of being cut off from his surroundings, of being projected, thrust forward toward the mysterious, empty auditorium with its shrouded seats and the little women bustling up and down in it. Almost irresistibly he was impelled to shout to them, to engage their attention, to make them look at him. His mind eased and a thrill of importance ran through him: never had he seemed to himself to bulk so large. He was almost frightened: the immense power of the machinery, the lighted stage and the darkened auditorium alarmed and weighed crushingly upon him.“It’s like a vault,” said Matilda, “with no onein front. But when it’s full, on a Saturday night, hundreds and hundreds of faces, it’s wonderful.”To him it was not at all like a vault, but like an engine disconnected from its power. The mind abhors a vacuum, and he was striving to fill the emptiness all about him, thronging the auditorium with imaginary people, and struggling to occupy the magic area of light in which he stood. In vain: he was impotent. He felt trapped.“Let us go,” he said.On the stairs they met the manager.“Hullo, Tilly,” he said. “You’re a good girl.”“Thanks.”Old Mole hated the young man, for he was common and loose in manner and in no way worthy of the enchanted Matilda or of the marvelous organism, the theater, in which she seemed to live so easily and freely.His thoughts were much too confused for him to impart them to her, and he was vastly relieved when they left the theater and she became his Matilda.That night he read to her. He had been delighting in “Lucretius,” and he had marked passages, and he turned to that beginning:“Iam iam non domus accipiet te læta, neque uxor Optima. . . .”He translated for her:“ ‘Now no more shall a glad home and a true wife welcome thee, nor darling children race tosnatch thy first kisses and touch thy heart with a sweet silent content; no more mayest thou be prosperous in thy doings and a defence to thine own; alas and woe!’ say they, ‘one disastrous day has taken all these prizes of thy life away from thee’—but thereat they do not add this, ‘and now no more does any longing for these things assail thee.’ This did their thought but clearly see and their speech follow they would deliver themselves from much burning of the heart and dread. ‘Thou, indeed, as thou art sunk in the sleep of death, wilt so be for the rest of the ages, severed from all weariness and pain.’ . . .“Yet again, were the nature of things to utter a voice and thus with her own lips upbraid one of us, ‘What ails thee, O mortal, that thou fallest into such vain lamentation? Why weep and wail at death? For has thy past life and overspent been sweet to thee, and not all the good thereof, as though poured into a cracked pitcher, has run through and perished without joy, why dost thou not retire like a banqueter filled with life, and, calmly, O fool, take thy sleep? But if all thou hast had is perished and spilled and thy life is hateful, why seekest thou yet to add more which shall once again all perish and fall joylessly away? Why not rather make an end of life and labor? For there is nothing more that I can contrive and invent for thy delight; all things are the same forever. Even were thy body not yet withered, nor thy limbs weary and worn, yet all things remain the same, didst thou live on throughall the generations. Nay, even wert thou never doomed to die’—what is our answer?”
“Then you’re not going back?”
“Never: neither to the old work, nor to the old kind of people.”
“Not even when I tell you that Uncle Jocelyn is dead at last and has left us each ten thousand! Doesn’t that make any difference, H. J.?”
H. J. received this intelligence almost with dismay. It took him back into the family councils, the family speculations as to Uncle Jocelyn’s will, the family squabbles over Uncle Jocelyn’s personal effects and their distribution, the family impatience at Uncle Jocelyn’s unconscionable long time in dying. And the vision of it all irritated and weighed heavilyon him. Often in Thrigsby he had said to himself that when Uncle Jocelyn died he would retire. And now Uncle Jocelyn was dead and he found his legacy rather a bewilderment than a relief. It was such a large sum of money that it made him fall back into his old sense of the grotesque in his relations with Mr. Copas and his galley, just when he was congratulating himself on being able to enter on his new life with real zest and energy.
“No,” he said, “that makes no difference. I shall stay where I am.”
“If there is ever any trouble,” replied Robert, “I shall be only too glad to help.”
“Thank you.”
Robert tapped at his mustache and said:
“I suppose being married won’t interfere with your golf.”
“I’m afraid it will.” This came very tartly.
“Er. . . . Sorry.”
That had flicked Robert on the raw. He had been feeling indulgent toward his demented brother until his more than doubtful attitude toward ten thousand pounds. When that was followed with the renunciation of golf he was genuinely distressed and went away muttering behind his mustache:
“I give it up. I give it up. ’Pon my honor.Non compos,don’t y’know,non compos.”
Nothing would induce Old Mole to visit Thrigsby again, and his solicitor had to send a clerk downwith documents for his signature. When all the legal threads were tied up he told Matilda the extent of his fortune, and how he had been asked to return to his position at the school.
“Are you sorry?” she asked.
“No.”
“You sha’n’t ever be, for me. Will you read to me now?”
And he read the first two acts of “King Lear.”
“That isn’t the play you were reading the other day. The one about Venice and the man who was such a good soldier.”
He had begun “Othello,” but it had filled him with terror, for it had brought home to him the jealousy that was gnawing at his heart, creeping into his bones. Delivered from sentimentality by his surrender to his own generous impulse, sanded over as he was by years of celibacy, he had day by day more swiftly yielded to this woman whom he had taken for his wife, and had arrived at a passion torn, knotted, and twisted by jealousy of that other whom he had never known, whose child now waxed in her womb and brought her to long periods of almost self-hypnotized inward pondering, so that, though she was all grace, all tenderness and gratitude toward him, she was never his, never, even in their most pleasant moments, anything but remote. The agonies through which he passed made him only the more determined to be gentle with her, and often when he took her hand and pressed it, and she gave him not the pressure in return forwhich he hoped and so longed, he would be unable to bear it and would go out and walk for miles and cry out upon the injustice of the world. And then he would think that perhaps she loved him, perhaps it was an even greater torture to her to have this other between them; surely if that were so it must be keener suffering for her since it was her doing and her folly and not his. And he would hate the stain upon her, give way before the violence of his hatred, and call her unworthy and long with a sick longing for purity, an ideal mating, the first kindling in both man and woman so that each could be all to the other, wholly, with never so much as a thought lost in the past, never so much as the smallest wear and usage of anterior desire. . . . He would persuade himself that she did not love him at all; that she and the old bawd had entrapped him by sordid and base cunning. And those were the worst hours of all. But when he was with her and she gave him her smile or some little sudden friendly caress he would feel comforted and very sure of her and of the future when they would both forget, and then both his hatred and his longing for a perfect world would fall away from him and he would see them as absurd projections of those contrasts which arise and haunt the half-comprehending mind. And he would tell himself that all would be well; that they would be happy in the child which would be his also, for the love he had for her. And his jealousy would return.
Therefore he read “King Lear,” and the pity ofit purged him, though he was not without feeling that he, too, was cast out upon the barren places of the earth to face the storm and meet disaster. Feeling so he said to Matilda:
“Money and material things seem to have nothing to do with life at all. Here am I with you, whom I love. . . .”
“Do you?”
“I love you.”
“Thank you.”
“With you, and no possible anxiety as to the future, and yet I seem to myself to be on the very brink of explosion and disaster.”
“Dear man, I wish you wouldn’t think so much.”
“I must think, or my feelings swamp me.”
She thrilled him by taking his hand, and she said:
“Do you know what I want?”
“No. You shall have it.”
“I want to make you happy.”
That was the most definite assurance of her feeling for him she had as yet given him. It soothed his jealousy, made it easier for him to conquer it, but presently it laid him open to a new dread. The time for her confinement was drawing on, and he began to think that out, too; the violence and bloodiness of birth haunted him, the physical pain it entailed, the possibility of its being attended by death. She had promised him happiness, and she might die! He became over-scrupulous in his treatment of her and worried her about her health so that she lost her temper and said:
“After all, it’s me that’s got to go through with it, andIdon’t think about it.”
That brought him up sharp, and he held his peace and watched her. Truly she did not think about it. She accepted it. It was to her, it seemed, entirely a personal matter, perfectly in the order of things, to be worried through as occasion served. It might go well, or it might go ill, but meanwhile there were the things of the moment to be attended to and the day’s pleasure to be seized. He was humbled and a little envious of her. For a little while he indulged in an orgy of self-reproach, but she only laughed at him and told him that when she had so much cause for feeling depressed he might at least comfort her with the sight of a cheerful face. He laughed, too, and told himself he was a selfish ass and that she was made that way and he was made another, and that perhaps men and women are made so, men thinking and women accepting, or perhaps they only become so in the progress of their lives.
Matilda’s baby came four months after their marriage. It was still-born.
Sie war liebenswürdig und er liebte sie: aber er war nicht liebenswürdig und sie liebte ihn nicht.
IIMARRIAGE
MATILDA kept her promise and made her husband happy. She reduced him to that condition wherein men and women believe that never has the world been visited by such love and that they will go on loving forever and ever. This she achieved by leaving his affections to look after themselves and concentrating all her energies on seeing that he was properly fed and clothed, had the requisite amount of sleep and just enough cosseting to make him wish for more, which he did not get. She left the ordering of their coexistence in his hands, and he, being happy, span a cocoon of charming fancies about it, and showed little disposition to change. Therefore they continued with Mr. Copas and became acquainted with the four quarters of England and the two or three kinds of towns which in vast numbers have grown on it, like warts on the face of Oliver Cromwell. Bemused by the romance of love and the sense of well-being that its gratification brings, he observed very little and thought less, and he did not perceive that he was falling into a routine as dispirited as that in which he had gone round and round out of adolescenceinto manhood and out of manhood into middle age. Such is the power of love—or rather of a certain very general over-indulged variant of it—that it can lift a man out of space and time and set him drifting and dreaming through a larger portion of his allotted span than he can afford to lose. As there is a sort of peace in this condition, it is highly prized: indeed, it passes for an ideal, being as material as a fatted pig into whose sides you can poke your finger, as into a cushion; it has the further merit that it needs no effort to attain, but only a fall and no struggle. Old Mole fell into it and prized it and told himself that life was very good. When he told his wife that life was very good she said that it was a matter of opinion and it depended what you happened to want.
“What do you want?” he asked.
She thumped her chest with the odd little teasing gesture that was perhaps most characteristic of her, and said:
“Something big.”
“Aren’t you content?”
“Oh, yes. But I want to know, to find out.”
He stretched his legs and, with a beautiful sense of enunciating wisdom, he remarked:
“There is nothing to know, nothing to find out. Here are we, a man and a woman, fulfilling the destiny of men and women, and, for the rest, happy enough in the occupation to which circumstances and our several destinies and characters have brought us. I am perfectly happy, my dear, most surprisinglyhappy when I look back and consider all things. I have no ambition, no hopes, and, I fancy, no illusions; most happily of all, I have no politics. I did not make the world and I do not believe that I can undo anything good or evil which, for the world’s purposes, is necessary to be done. . . .”
He had developed a habit of talking and did not know it. She had taken refuge in silence and was aware of it.
Once she asked him if he did not feel the want of friends.
“Friends?” he answered. “I want nothing while I have you.”
She made no reply and he was left hurt, because he had expected appreciation of his entire devotion.
She was happy, too, but more keenly than he, for she was a little dazed by her astounding luck, and behind her pleasure in him and his unfailing kindness and consideration lay the sting of uneasiness and the dread that the comfort of such charming days could not last. Ignorant, untaught, unprepared, love had been for her a kiss of the lips, a surrender to the flood of perilous feeling, a tampering with forces that might or might not sweep you to ruin: a matter of fancy, dalliance, and risk. She had fancied, dallied, dared, and when she had thought to be swept to ruin—and that swift descent also had had its sickening fascination—she had been tumbled into this security where love was solid,comfortable, omnipresent, and apparently all providing. She was perpetually amazed at her husband and chafed only against herself because she could not share his complacency. It was easy for her to assimilate his manners and to take the measure of his refinement. With talk of her brothers and sisters she would lead him on to tell of his family, and especially of the women among whom he had spent his boyhood, and she would contrast herself with them and rebel against everything in herself that was not harmonious with their atmosphere. And she found it increasingly difficult to get on with her aunt, Mrs. Copas.
The new comic, John Lomas, was a great success. He was a fat little man in the fifties with a thorough knowledge of his business, which was to make any and every kind of audience laugh. A wonderful stock of tricks he had, tricks of voice, of limbs, of gesture, of facial expression, nothing but tricks, inexhaustible. He cared about nothing in the world but what he called “the laugh,” and when he got one he wanted another, and always had a quip or a leer or a cantrip to get it. But he was a rascal and a drunkard, and had lost all sense of the fitness of things and always went on too long until his audience was weary of him. Therefore he had come down and down until he found an appetite to feed that was gross enough to bear with his insistence. . . . He said—it may have been true—that he had played before the King of England, and he was full of stories of the theaters in London,the real nobby theaters where the swells paid half a guinea for a seat and brought their wives and other people’s wives in shining jewels and dresses cut low back and front. He had played in every kind of piece, from the old-fashioned kind of burlesque to melodrama, drama, and Shakespeare, and he had never had any luck, but had always been on the point of making a fortune. “Charley’s Aunt,” he said, had been offered to him, and he had taken an option, but at the last moment his backers failed him. “And look at the money that had made and was still making.” His first stage of intoxication was melancholy, and then he would weep over the mess he had made of his life and grow maudlin and tell how badly he had treated the dear little woman who had been his wife so that she had left him and gone off with a bloody journalist. When that mood passed he would grow excited and blustering, and brag of the slap-up women he had had when he was making his thirty pounds a week. His most intimate confessions were reserved for Matilda, for he despised Copas because he had never known anything better than a fit-up. And of Mr. Mole he was rather scared.
“I don’t know,” he would say to Matilda. “I don’t know what it is, but your guv’nor ain’t one of us, is he now?”
And when Matilda agreed that Mr. Mole was different he called her a silly cuckoo for not making him take her to London and the Continong to have a high old time.
He could play the piano in a fumbling fashion, and he used to sing through the scores of some of the old pieces he had been in, with reminiscences of the players who had been successful in them and full histories of their ups and downs and their not unblemished lives, all with a full-throated sentimentality that made every tale as he told it romantic and charming. Broken and rejected by it as he was, he worshiped the theater and gloried in it, and the smell of the grease paint was to him as the smell of the field to a Jewish patriarch.
One day he insisted that Matilda should sing, and he taught her one of the old coon songs that had haunted London in the days of his prosperity. At first she was shy and sang only from her throat, and he banged out the accompaniment and drowned her voice and told her that really no one would hear her but the conductor. She must sing so that she could feel as if her voice was a little bigger than herself. The phrase seized her imagination, and she tried again. This time she produced a few full notes and then had no breath left to compass the rest. However, he was satisfied, and said she’d do for the chorus all right.
“And some of those gels, mark you,” he said, “do very well for themselves, in the way of marriage, and out of it.”
He taught her to dance, said she had just the feet for it. “Not real slap-up dancing, of course, but the sort you get in any old London show; the sort that’s good enough with all the rest—and you’vegot that all right, my dear—and not a bit of good without it.”
The development of these small accomplishments gave her a very full pleasure, greater confidence in herself, and a feeling of independence. She took a naïve and childish pride in her body from which these wonders came. They gave her far keener delight than “the acting” had ever done, but she never connected them with her ambition. They were a purely personal secret treasure, an inmost chamber whither she could retire and let go, and be expansively, irresponsibly herself.
Toward the end of the first year of their marriage, in the harsh months of the close of the year, they were for six weeks in a city that sprawled and tumbled over the huge moors of Yorkshire. It rained almost continuously, and it was very cold, but in that city, which almost less than any other of the industrial purgatories of the kingdom appreciates art and the things of the mind, they prospered. John Lomas got his fill of laughter, and, the kinematograph being no new thing there, the theater weathered that competition.
Matilda wrote to her sister, Mrs. Boothroyd, whose husband was employed at the municipal gasworks, and sent her a pass. She gave her news: how she was married and happy and enjoying her work with her uncle. The Boothroyd family only knew of Matilda’s disaster and nothing of her subsequent history. Mr. Boothroyd, who was a deaconat his chapel, forbade his wife to take any notice of the letter, and she obeyed him, but, when he was on the night shift at the works, she made use of the pass.
The program consisted of Mr. Mole’s “Iphigenia,” and a farce introduced into the repertory by John Lomas from what he could remember of a successful venture at the old Strand Theater in London. Matilda appeared in both pieces. She was so successful that Mrs. Boothroyd, who sat in the front row, swelled with pride, and, as she clapped her hands, turned to her neighbor:
“Isn’t she good? And so pretty, too! Whoever would have thought it? But there always was something about her. She’s my sister, you know.”
“Indeed? Then I am pleased to meet you. She is my wife.”
“Well, I never! . . .”
Mrs. Boothroyd seized Old Mole by the hand and shook it warmly, while she giggled with excitement. She bore a faint resemblance to Matilda, but looked worn, had that pathetic, punctured appearance which comes from overmuch child-bearing. Throughout the rest of the performance she only glanced occasionally at the stage and devoted her attention to scanning her brother-in-law’s appearance. At the close of the second piece she said:
“Iamglad. It would never ha’ done for her to ’ave a young ’usband. She was always the flighty one.”
This sounded ominously to Old Mole, who for more than a year now had been young with Matilda’s youth, and so comfortably accustomed to it that he never dared in thought dissever himself from her. He rejoined that his sister-in-law would be glad to know that Matilda was settled down.
They went behind and found her hot and flustered, painted, and half out of the gipsy dress in which she had made her last appearance. When she saw Mrs. Boothroyd she gave a cry of delight, rushed to her and flung her arms round her neck and kissed her.
“Didn’t Jimmy come, too?”
“No; Jimmy was at the works, and couldn’t come.”
Matilda asked after all the Boothroyd children and her own brothers and sisters, and all their illnesses and minor disasters were retailed. Mr. and Mrs. Copas came in and embraced Bertha Boothroyd, whom they had not seen since she was a little girl, and when she said how proud she was of Matilda they replied that she had every reason to be. John Lomas appeared with stout and biscuits, and the occasion was celebrated. Warmed by this conviviality, Mrs. Boothroyd invited them all to tea with her on the next day but one, then, alarmed at the thought of what she had done, gave a little frightened gasp, was pale and silent for a few moments, and at last said she must be home to give Jim his supper when he came back.
She kissed and was kissed. Her disquietude had blown the high spirits of the party. When she had gone Matilda said:
“Jim’s a devil. Bertha’s had a baby every year since she was married, and he thinks of nothing but saving his own soul.”
Next day came a note from Bertha saying she was afraid her little house would not accommodate the whole party, but would Matilda bring her husband. “Is Mr. Mole an actor?” she asked. “I told Jim he wasn’t.”
Bertha’s address was 33 June Street. It was a long journey by tram, and then Matilda and her husband had to walk nearly a mile down a monotonous road intersected with little streets. The name of the road was Pretoria Avenue, and on one side the little streets were called after the months of the year, and on the other after the twelve Apostles. The Boothroyds therefore lived in the very heart of the product of the end of the nineteenth century. Their front door opened straight on to the street, they had a little yard at the back, and their house consisted of eight rooms. The parlor door was unlocked for the visit, and, amid photographs of many Boothroyds, testimonials to the worthiness of James Boothroyd and his Oddfellows’ certificate, tea was laid, none of your proper Yorkshire teas, but afternoon tea with thin bread and butter. Five little Boothroyds in clean collars and pinafores wereplaced round the room, and stared alternately at the cake on the table and their aunt and their new uncle. Old Mole endeavored to avoid their gaze, but the room seemed full of round staring gray eyes, and when he considered the corpulent American organ that took up the whole wall opposite the fireplace, he was astonished that so many people could be crammed into so small a space. Then he estimated that there were at least sixty other exactly similar houses in the street, that from January to December there were streets in replica, not to mention those on the other side of the road which were named from John to—surely not to Judas? He remembered then that one street was called Paul Street. . . . Dozens and dozens of houses, each with its Boothroyd family and its American organ. Dejectedly he told himself that these were the poor, until, glancing across at Matilda, he remembered that it was from such a house, among dozens of such houses, that she had come. That thought colored his survey, and he reminded himself, as nearly always he was forced to do when considering her actions or any episode in her history, that his own comfortable middle-class standards were not at all proper to the consideration of the phenomena of mean streets. Desperately anxious to make himself pleasant to Matilda’s sister, he asked heavily:
“Are these all——?”
She was in such a flutter that she did not leave him time to finish his sentence, took him to be referringto the children, and said: “Yes, they were all hers, and there were two more in the kitchen.”
With more tact Matilda cut the cake and gave a piece to each of the five children. Mrs. Boothroyd said she was spoiling them, and Matilda retorted:
“If they’re good children you can’t spoil them.”
And the children giggled crumbily and presently they sidled and edged up to their aunt and began to finger her and pluck at her clothes. Seeing his wife so set Old Mole off on an entirely new train of thought and feeling, and he began to contrast the Copas atmosphere with this domestic interior. Very queerly it gave a sort of life to that crusted old formula that had, with so many others, gone by the board in his eruption from secondary education, wherein it was laid down that a woman’s place is her home. He could never, without discomfort, apply any formula to Matilda, but to see her there, with the bloom on her, in her full beauty, with the five little children at her knees, made this idea so attractive that he was loath to relinquish it: nor did he do so until Matilda asked if she might see the house, when she and Mrs. Boothroyd and the five children left him alone with the ruins of the cake and the American organ.
He was profoundly uneasy. He had not exactly idealized the Copas theater and all its doings, but he had come to them on the crest of a violent wave of reaction and had been apt to set them against and above everything in the world that was solid and stolid and workaday. It had been enchantedfor him by Matilda, and she had in June Street set an even more potent spell upon him and wafted him not into any kingdom of the imagination, but into the warm heart of life itself. In the Copas world he had made no allowance for children: in June Street, in dull industrial respectability, children were paramount. They surrounded Matilda and set him, in his slow fashion, tingling to the marvel of her. His response to this miracle took the form of a desire to open his pockets to the children. He took out a handful of money, and had selected five shillings when the door opened and a man entered, a dark, white-faced, thin-lipped man, with dirty hands and an aggressive jut of the shoulders.
“Ye’ve been tea-partying, I see,” said the man.
Old Mole explained his identity. The man put his head out of the door and yelled to his wife. She returned with Matilda, but the children did not come. James Boothroyd ignored the visitors to his house and said to his cowering wife:
“You’ll clean up yon litter an’ you’ll lock t’door. What’ll neighbors say of us? I don’t know these folk. You’ll lock t’door and then you’ll gi’ me me tea in t’kitchen.”
There was no sign of anger in the man. He had taken in the situation at a glance and was concerned only to bring it to the issue he desired. His relations by marriage were spotted by a world which he shunned as darkest Hell, and he would have none of them.
With as much dignity as he could muster, Old Mole led his wife out into June Street. He was filled only with pity for Bertha.
Said Matilda: “Didn’t I tell you he was a devil?”
Later in their lodging he asked her:
“Are all the men in those streets like that?”
“If they’re religious, they’re like that. If they’re not religious they’re drunk. If they’re not drunk you never know when they’re going to leave you. That’s the sort of life I came out of and that’s the sort of life I’m never going back into if I can help it.”
“You won’t need to, my dear.”
“You never know.”
With which disquieting assurance he was left to reflect that she seemed to have been as much upset by her visit to June Street as himself. He was tormented by a vision of England, this little isle, the home of heroes and great men, groaning beneath the weight of miles of such streets and sinking under the tread of millions of men like James Boothroyd. Lustily he strove for a cool, intellectual consideration of it all, a point from which the network of the meanish streets of the cities of England could be seen as justifiable, necessary, and unto their own ends sufficient, but, seen from the Copas world, they were repulsive and harsh; viewed through Matilda they were touched with magic.
They were both unsettled and passed through days of irritation when they came perilously near toquarreling. In the end they made it up and found that they had conquered new territory for intimacy. On that territory they discussed their marriage, and he told her that he would like her to have a child. She burst into tears, and confessed that after her calamity the doctor had told her it was very improbable she ever would. He was for so long silent on that, being numbed by the sudden chill at his heart, that she took alarm and came and knelt at his side and implored him to forgive her, and said that if he did not she would go out on to the railway or into the canal. Then he, too, wept, and they held each other close and sobbed out that the world was very, very cruel, but they must be all in all to each other. And he said they would go away and settle down in some pretty place and live quietly and happily together right away from towns and theaters and everything. She shook her head, and, with the tears streaming down her cheeks, she said: No, she did not want to be a lady; at least, not that sort of a lady. He made many suggestions, but always her mind flew ahead of his, and she had constructed some horrid sort of a picture of the existence it would entail. At last he gave it up and said he supposed if there was to be a change it would come of its own accord.
It came.
Mrs. Copas, quite suddenly and for no apparent reason, decided that she was middle-aged, entirely altered her style of dressing and doing her hair,and, as the outward and visible sign of the advent of her maturity, set her heart on a black silk gown. She cajoled and teased and bullied her husband, but in vain. He was replenishing the theatrical wardrobe and could not be led to take any interest in hers. She pursued Mr. Mole with hints and flattery, but he could not or would not see her purpose. He had decided that Matilda should be dressed in a style more befitting his wife than she had adopted heretofore, and was spending many happy and weary hours in the shops patronized by the wives of clerks and well-to-do tradespeople. Incidentally he discovered a great deal about what women wear and its powerful influence over their whole being. In her new clothes Matilda was more dignified, more handsome, more certain of herself, and she gained in grace. . . . Mrs. Copas took to haunting their lodgings and was nearly always there when a new hat or a new jacket came home from the shops. She would insist on Matilda’s trying them on, and would go into loud ecstatic praise and long reminiscences of the fine garments she had had when she was a young woman, and Mr. Copas was the most attentive husband in the world.
An old peacock without its tail is a sorry sight, and the young birds scorn him. Matilda did not exactly scorn her aunt, but her continued presence was an irritant. She was not yet at her ease in the possession of many fine clothes and was entirely set on gaining the mastery of them and of the accession of personality they brought. Mrs. Copas wasa clog upon this desire, and therefore when, after many hints and references, she came suddenly to the point and asked pointblank for a loan of four pounds wherewith to buy a black silk gown, Matilda flushed with anger and exasperation and replied curtly that her husband was not made of money.
“No, dearie, I know, but I’d so set my heart on a black silk gown.”
And the towsled old creature looked so pathetic and disappointed that Matilda was on the point of yielding; but indeed she was really alarmed at the amount of money that had been spent—more than twenty pounds—and she followed up her reply with a firm No.
Mrs. Copas took it ill, and set herself to making things unpleasant for Mr. Mole and his wife. She had control of affairs behind scenes and also of the commissariat, and it was not long before she had provoked a quarrel. Matilda told her she was a disagreeable old woman; to which she hit back with:
“Some women don’t care how they get husbands.”
Following on that there was such a sparring and snarling that in the end Mr. Copas declared that his theater was not big enough for the two of them, and that Matilda must either eat her words and beg her aunt’s pardon or go. As the most injurious insults had come from her aunt, Matilda kicked against the injustice of this decree and flounced away. She said nothing to her husband of what had taken place. They were at the beginning of December, and already the hoardings of the townwere covered with announcements of the approaching annual pantomime at the principal theater, together with the names of the distinguished artistes engaged. Matilda dressed herself in her very smartest and for the first time donned the musquash toque, tippet and muff she had been given. They were the first furs she had ever possessed, and she felt so grand in them that she was shy of wearing them. When she had walked along several streets and seen herself in a shop window or two, they gave her courage for her purpose, and she told herself that she was, after all, as good as anyone else who might be wanting to do the work, set her chin in the air, went to the theater, and asked to see the manager. The doorkeeper had instructions not to turn away anything that looked promising and only to reject those who looked more than thirty-five and obviously had no chance of looking pretty even behind the footlights. He did not reject Matilda. She was shown into the manager’s presence, stated her wishes and accomplishments and experience. The manager did not invite her either to sing or to dance, but asked her if she minded what she wore. She had seen pantomimes in Thrigsby, and she said she did not mind.
“All right, my dear,” said the manager, who was good looking, young, but pale and weary in expression. And Matilda found herself engaged for the chorus at one pound a week.
She told Lomas first, and he was delighted. When it came to her husband she found it rather difficultto tell him, was half afraid that he would forbid her to pursue the adventure, and half ashamed, after his great kindness, of having acted without consulting him. However, she was determined to go on with it and to uproot him from the Copas theater. She began by telling him of her quarrel with her aunt.
“I thought that was bound to happen,” he said.
“Yes. It came to that that uncle said I must go. What do you think I’ve done?”
“Bought a new dress?”
“No. Better than that.”
“Made friends with the Lord Mayor?”
“Funny! No.”
“What have you done, then?”
“I’ve got an engagement at the theater, the real, big theater where they have a proper stage, and a stage door and a box office, and a manager who wears evening dress.”
“Indeed? And for how long?”
“It may be for ten weeks and it may be for thirteen. It was fifteen last year.”
“And what am I to do?”
She had not thought about him and was nonplussed. However, he needed very little cajoling before he gave his consent to her plan, and she told him that if he got bored he could easily go away by himself and come back when he wasn’t bored any longer. Inwardly he felt that the difficulty was not going to be so easily settled as all that, but he was on the whole relieved to be rid of Mr. Copas,who had arranged to move on as soon as the pantomime opened to the distraction of the public and the devastation of his business. When Mr. Mole announced his intention of remaining the actor was affronted and refused to speak to him again. Matilda said, a little maliciously, that he was afraid of being asked for the money he owed them, and that was her parting shot after Mrs. Copas, who got her own back with the loud sneer in Mr. Mole’s presence:
“There’s not many married women would wear tights and not many husbands would let ’em.”
Old Mole gasped, and looked forward with dread to the first performance of the pantomime. He was spared the indignity of tights, for the fifty women in the chorus were divided into “girls” and “boys,” in accordance with their size, and Matilda was a “girl.” She took her work very seriously, put far more energy into it than she had ever done into “Iphigenia” or “Josephine.” The theater, one of the largest in England, awed her by the size of its machinery, and she was excited and impressed by all the talk and gossip she heard of the doings of the theaters and the halls. She disliked most of her colleagues in the chorus, and of the principals only one was not too exalted to take notice of her. This was a young actor named, professionally, Carlton Timmis (pronounced Timms), who played the Demon King. He was very attentive and kind to her, and when she asked if she might introduce him to her husband he was obviously dismayed, but expressedhimself as delighted. He was a rather beautiful young man and very romantic, and he and Old Mole found much to talk of together.
“You can’t think,” said Timmis, “what a relief it is to meet a man with a soul. Among all those idiots one is parched, withered, dried up.”
And much the same thought was in Old Mole’s mind. Looking back he was astonished that he could for so long have tolerated the unintelligent society in which he had been cast. Timmis had decided, if erratic, opinions, and he loved nothing better than gloomily to grope after philosophical conceptions. Being very young and unsuccessful, he was pessimistic and clutched eagerly at everything which encouraged him in his belief in a world blindly responding to some mysterious law of destruction. Old Mole was inclined toward optimistic Deism and materialism, and they struck sparks out of each other, Timmis moving in a whirl of nebulous ideas, and his interlocutor moving so slowly that, by contrast, he seemed almost rigid.
“Take myself,” Timmis would say. “Can there be any sense in a world which condemns me to play the Demon King in an idiotic pantomime, or indeed in a world which demands, indulges, encourages, delights in such driveling nonsense as that same pantomime?”
“There is room for everything in the world, which is very large,” replied Old Mole.
“Then why are men starved, physically, morally and spiritually?”
“The universe,” came the reply, between two long puffs of a cigar, “was not made for man, but man was made for the universe.”
(This was an impromptu, but Old Mole often recurred to it, and indeed declared that his philosophy dated from that day and that utterance.)
“But why was the universe made?”
“Certainly not from human motives and not in terms of human understanding. To hear you talk one would think the whole creation was in a state of decomposition.”
“So it is. That is its motive force, an irresistible rotting away into nothing. I don’t believe anything but decomposition could produce that pantomime.”
“The pantomime is so small a thing that I think it impossible for it to be visibly affected by any universal process. It is simply a human contrivance for the amusement of human beings, and you must admit that it succeeds in its purpose.”
“It has no purpose. It succeeds in spite of its stupidity by sheer force of the amiable cleverness of an overpaid buffoon and the charm and physical attractions of two or three young women.”
Old Mole was forced to admit the justice of this criticism, and to drive it home Timmis recited the eight lines with which in the cave scene he introduced the ballet:
Now Sinbad’s wrecked and nearly drowned, you see.He thinks he’s saved, but has to deal with me.I’ll wreck him yet and rack his soul as well—A shipwrecked sailor suits my purpose fell.I’ll catch his soul and make it mine for ayeAnd he’ll be sorry he ever stepped this way.But who comes here to brave my cave’s dark night?Aha! Oh, curse! It is the Fairy Light.
Now Sinbad’s wrecked and nearly drowned, you see.
He thinks he’s saved, but has to deal with me.
I’ll wreck him yet and rack his soul as well—
A shipwrecked sailor suits my purpose fell.
I’ll catch his soul and make it mine for aye
And he’ll be sorry he ever stepped this way.
But who comes here to brave my cave’s dark night?
Aha! Oh, curse! It is the Fairy Light.
Matilda had been listening to them, and she said:
“Doesn’t she look lovely when she comes on all in white? Such a pretty voice she has, too.”
“You like the pantomime, my dear?”
“Oh, yes!”
“Could you say why?”
“It’s pretty and gay, and it’s wonderful to hear the people in that great big place laughing and singing the choruses.”
“You see, Timmis, the pantomime has justified its existence.”
“But what on earth has it got to do with Sinbad?”
“Nothing. Why should it? Sinbad is an Eastern tale. The pantomime is an English institution. It reflects the English character. It is heavy, solid, gross, over-colored, disconnected, illogical and unimaginative. On the other hand, it is humorous, discreetly sensual, varied and full of physical activity. It affords plenty to listen to and nothing to hear, plenty to look at and nothing to see, and it is like one of those Christmas puddings which quickly make the body feel overfed and provide it with no food.”
“Anyhow,” said Matilda, “it’s a great success, and they say it will run until after Easter.”
It did so: the tunes in it were whistled and sung in the streets, the comedians’ gags became catchwords, the principal buffoon kicked off at a charity football match, and, upon inquiry, Old Mole found that clerks, schoolboys and students visited the theater once a week, and that among the young sparks of the town, sons of mill-owners and ironmasters, there was considerable competition for the favors of the chorus ladies. Some of these phenomena he remembered having observed in Thrigsby, and at least one of his old pupils had come to grief through a lady of the chorus and been expelled by his affrighted family to the Colonies. By the end of the fifth week he was thoroughly sick of it all, and he began to agree with Timmis that the success of the show was very far from justifying it. It was so completely lacking in character as to be demoralizing. His third visit left him clogged and thick-witted, as though he had been breathing stale air. It was a poison: and if it were so for him, what (he asked himself) must it be for young minds and spirits? . . . And yet Matilda throve in it. She liked the work and she now liked the company, who, being prosperous, were amiable, and they liked her. Most of all, she loved the independence, the passage from the solid, safe, warmly tender atmosphere with which her husband surrounded her to the heat, the rush and the excitement of the theater. When he left her at the stagedoor she would give a shrug of the shoulders that was almost a shake, give him a swift parting smile that he always felt might have been given to a stranger, and with a quick gladness dart through into the lighted passage. . . . Before many weeks had passed she had letters, flowers, presents, from unknown admirers. He asked Timmis if there was any harm in them, and the actor replied that it was the usual thing, that women had to look after themselves in the theater, and that these attentions pleased the management. They pleased Matilda: she laughed at the letters, decorated their rooms with the flowers, and left the presents with the stage doorkeeper, who annexed them. Old Mole definitely decided that he disliked the whole business and began to think enviously of James Boothroyd, who was religious and a devil, but did at least have his own way in his own house. To achieve that the first thing necessary was to have a house, and he half resolved to return to his old profession—not considering himself to be fit for any other. But he never rounded the resolution and he never broached his thoughts to Matilda. He told himself that by Easter it would be all over and they would go away, perhaps abroad, see the world. . . . Then he realized that apart from Matilda he had no desires whatever, that his affections were entirely engaged in her, and that, further, he was spasmodically whirled off his feet in a desire that was altogether independent of his will, obedient only to some profound logic either of his own character or of theworld outside him, to mark and consider the ways of men. Rather painfully he was aware of being detached from himself, and sometimes in the street, in a tram, he would pull himself up with a start and say to himself:
“I don’t seem to be caring what happens to me. I seem to be altogether indifferent to whatever I am doing, to have no sort of purpose, while all these men and women round me are moving on with very definite aims.”
Deliberately he made the acquaintance of men teaching in the little university of the place and in its grammar school. He saw himself in them. He could talk their language, but whereas to them their terms were precise and important, to him they were nothing but jargon. . . . No: into that squirrel cage he would not go again. They seemed happy enough and pleased with themselves, but, whereas he could enter fully into their minds, the new regions that he had conquered for himself were closed to them. They complained, as he had done in Thrigsby, of the materialism of their city, and in moments of enthusiasm talked of the great things they could do for the younger generation, the future citizens of the Empire, if only some of the oozing wealth of the manufacturers could be diverted to their uses. But the city had its own life, and they were no more a part of it than he had been of Thrigsby. . . . When they had cured him of his discontent he was done with them, and took refuge in books. He bought in a great store ofthem and fumbled about in them for the threads of philosophy he was seeking. He procured stimulation, but very little satisfaction, and he was driven to the streets and the public places. Very secret was the life of that city. Its trades were innumerable. Everything was manufactured in it from steel to custard powder. It owed its existence to the neighboring coalfields, its organization to a single family of bankers whose interests were everywhere, in almost every trade, in the land, in the houses, in the factories, in the supply of water and lighting, and everywhere their interests were trebly safeguarded. The city lived only for the creation of wealth and by it. With the distribution of wealth and the uses it was put to it had no concern; nor had its citizens time to consider them. Their whole energies were absorbed in keeping their place in the markets of the world, and they were too exhausted for real pleasure or domestic happiness. When Old Mole considered the life of that city by and large, James Boothroyd appeared to him as its perfect type. And yet he retained his optimism, telling himself that all this furious energy was going to the forging of the city of the future.
“The bees,” he said, “build the combs in their hives, the ants the galleries in their hills, and men their sprawling cities, and to everything under the sun there is a purpose. Let me not make the mistake of judging the whole—which I cannot see—by the part.”
He had reached this amiable conclusion whenCarlton Timmis entered his room, sat down by the table and laid a bulky quarto envelope on it. He was agitated, declined the proffered cigar, and broke at once into the following remarkable oration:
“Mr. Mole, you are one of the few men I have ever met who can do nothing with dignity and without degradation. Therefore I have come to you in my distress to make a somewhat remarkable request. And it is due to you and to myself to make some explanation.”
He seemed so much in earnest, almost hysterical, and his great eyes were blazing with such a fervor that Old Mole could not but listen.
“My real name,” said Timmis, “is Cuthbert Jones. My father is a small shopkeeper in Leicestershire. He is a man, so far as I can discover, devoid of feeling, but with a taste for literature and—God knows why, at this time of day!—the philosophy of the Edinburgh school. He had a cruel sense of humor and he made my mother very unhappy. He encouraged me to read, to write, to think, to be pleased with my own thoughts. It amused him, I fancy, to see me blown out with my own conceit, so that he might have the pleasure of pricking my bladder-head and then distending it again. For weeks together I would have his praise, and then nothing but the most bitter gibes. I had either to cling to my conceit to keep my head above water or sink into the depths of misery and self-distrust. I devoured the lives of illustrious menand attributed their fame to those qualities in them which I was able to find in myself. I sought solitude, avoided companions of my own age, and I was always desperately, wretchedly in love with some one or other. I really believed myself to be a genius, or rather I used to count over my symptoms and decide one day that I was, the next that I was not. All this roused my father to such a malicious delight, and with his teasing he made my life so intolerable that at last I could stand it no longer, and I ran away. I walked to London, and then, after applying in vain for work at the newspaper offices, I obtained a situation in a theater as a call boy. I could not possibly live on what I earned, and should have been in a bad way but for a kind creature, a dresser, who lodged me in her house, took my wages in return, and allowed me pocket money and money for my clothes. I wrote to my father and received an extraordinary letter in which he applauded my action and expressed his belief that nothing could prevent a man of genius from coming to the top. ‘It is as impossible to keep a bad man up as to keep a good man down,’ he said. I have neither gone down nor up, Mr. Mole. As I have grown older I have slipped into one precarious employment after another. No one pays any attention to me, no one, except yourself, has ever troubled to discover my thoughts on any subject, and often, when I have been inclined to think myself the most miserable of men, I have found correction in the memory of my boyish belief in my genius. . . . Such changes of fortuneas I have had have come to me through women. All the kindness I ever received came through them, and every disaster that has crushed me has arisen through my inability to stop myself from falling in love with them. . . . You will understand what I mean when I talk of the life of the mind. That life has always been with me, and it has perhaps been my only real life. I have had great adventures in it. I have aimed and wrestled and struggled toward a goal that has many times seemed to me immediately attainable.”
He paused and brushed back his hair, and his eyes set into an expression of extraordinary wistful longing and into his voice came a sweetness most musical and moving.
“There is, I believe, a condition within the reach of all men wherein the selfish self is shed, the barrier broken down between a man and his vision and purpose, so that his whole force can be concentrated upon his object and his every deed and every thought becomes an act of love. I have many a time come within reach of this condition, but always just when I seemed most sure I have toppled over head and ears in love with some woman, whom in a very short space of time I despised and detested. When I met you I was uplifted and exalted and come nearer to my goal than ever before, and now, more fatuously, more idiotically than ever, I am in love. . . . I give it up. I am forced to the conclusion that I am one of those unhappy beings who are condemned to live between one state and the other, tobe neither a slave bent on eating, drinking, sleeping and the grosser pleasures, nor a free man satisfying his every lust and every desire, by the way, only the more sturdily and mightily to go marching on with the great army of friends, lovers and comrades. . . . In short, Mr. Mole, I am done for.”
“Well, well.” Old Mole was aware of the entire inadequacy of this either as comment or as consolation, but he was baffled by the self-absorption which had gone to the making of this elaborate analysis: and yet he had been stirred by the Demon King’s vision of the possibilities of human nature and roused by the words “every deed and every thought an act of love.” There was a platonic golden idealism about it that lifted him back into his own youth, his own always comfortable dreams, and, contrasting himself with Timmis (or Jones), he saw how immune his early years had been from suffering. Timmis might be done for, but if anyone was to blame it was his malicious, erratic father. Then, with his mind taking a wide sweep, he saw that there could be no question of blame or of attaching it, since that father had also had a father who perhaps suffered from something worse than Edinburgh philosophy. There could be no question of blame. The world was so constructed that Timmis (or Jones) was bound to be out of luck and to fail, just as it seemed to be in the order of creation that he himself, H. J. Beenham, should be comfortable and beyond the reach of the cares most common to mankind. There were fat kine and leankine, and, come what may, the lean kine would still light upon the meager pasture.
There be fat men and lean men, but men have this advantage over kine, that they can understand and help each other.
So Old Mole nursed his knee and told himself that Timmis was obviously sincere in believing himself to be done for, and therefore for all practical purposes he was done for, and there was no other useful course to pursue than to listen to what further he might have to say, and then, from his point of view, to consider the position and see if there were not something he had overlooked in his excited despair.
Timmis concluded his tale, and nothing had escaped him. His own opinion of his moral condition must be accepted: as to his material state, that could not possibly be worse. He had loved, wooed and won a lady in the chorus upon whom the manager had cast a favorable eye and the light of his patronage. There had been a scene, an altercation, almost blows. Timmis’s engagement ceased on the spot, and, as he said, he now understood why actors put up with so much insult, insolence and browbeating on the part of their managers. He had three shillings in his pocket with which to pay his rent and face the world, and he was filled with disgust of women, of the theater, of himself, and would Mr. Mole be so kind as to lend him fifty pounds with which to make a new start in a new country; he believed that in fresh surroundings, thousandsof miles away from any philosophy or poetry, or so-called art, he could descend to a lower level of existence, and perhaps, without the intervention of another disastrous love affair, redeem his false start. He was not, he said, asking for something for nothing—no man born and bred in England could ever bring himself to ask for or to expect that!—he was prepared to give security of a sort which only a man of intelligence and knowledge of affairs would accept. He had brought a play with him in typescript. It was called “Lossie Loses.” In his time Timmis had written many plays, and they were all worthless except this one. Most of them were good in intention but bad in performance: he had burned them. This was bad in intention but good in execution, and one of these days it would become a considerable property. An agent in London had a copy, he said, and he would write to this man and tell him that he had transferred all his rights to Mr. Mole. He then produced a pompous little agreement assigning his property and stating the consideration, wrote his name on it with a large flourishing hand, and passed it over with the play to his friend in need. After a moment’s hesitation, during which he squashed his desire to improve the occasion with a few general remarks, Old Mole thought of the unlucky creature’s three shillings and of the deliverance that fifty pounds would be to him, and at once produced his checkbook and wrote out a check.
No man has yet discovered the art of taking a check gracefully. Timmis shuffled it into his pocket,hemmed and ha’d for a few seconds, and then bolted.
Old Mole took up his play and began to read it. It did not interest him, but he could not put it down. There was not a true emotion in it, not a reasonable man or woman, but it was full of surprising tricks and turns and quiddities, was perpetually slopping over from sugary tenderness to shy laughter, and all the false emotions in it were introduced so irrelevantly as never to be thoroughly cloying, and indeed sometimes to give almost that sensation of delighted surprise which comes truly only from the purest and happiest art. Not until it was some moments out of his hands did Old Mole recognize the thing in all its horrid spuriousness. Then he flung it from him, scowled at it, fumed over it, and finally put it away and resolved to think no more about it or of Carlton Timmis.
That night when he met Matilda she was in high delight. The “second girl” was ill; her understudy had been called away to the sick bed of her only surviving aunt, and she had been chosen to play the part at a matinée to see if she could do it. Her name would not be on the program, but she would have ten lines to speak and one verse in a quartet to sing, and a dance with the third comedian. Wasn’t it splendid? And couldn’t they go and have supper at the new hotel just to celebrate it? All the girls were talking about the hotel, and she had never been to a real restaurant.
It is hard not to feel generous when you havegiven away fifty pounds, and Old Mole yielded. They had oysters and grilled kidneys, and they drank champagne. Matilda had never tasted it before and she made a little ceremony of it. It was so pretty (she said), such a lovely color, and the bubbles were so funnily busy. He drank too much of it and became amorous. Matilda was wonderfully pretty and amusing in her excitement, and he could not take his eyes off her.
“Tell me,” he said, “do you really like this life?”
“I love it. It’s something like what I’ve always wanted to be. In some ways it’s better and some ways it’s worse.”
“I don’t see much of you now.”
“You like me all the better when you do see me.”
“We’re not getting on much with your education.”
“Education be blowed.”
He was distressed and wished she had not said “be blowed.” She saw his discomfort and leaned forward and patted his hand.
“Don’t you fret, my dear. There’s a good time coming.”
But unaccountably he was depressed. He was feeling sorry he had brought her. There was a vulgarity, a sensuousness in the glitter and gilt of the restaurant that sorted ill with what in his heart he felt and was proud to feel for Matilda. He was sorry that she liked it, but saw, too, that she could not help but be pleased since to her it was all noveland dazzling. Hardest of all to bear, he was forced to admit that he had no immediate alternative to lay before her.
They drove home in a taxi, and she caressed him and soothed him and told him he was the dearest, kindest, gentlest and most considering husband any girl could have the luck to find. And once again, ominously, he was struck by the strangeness of the word husband on her lips. For a short while he was haunted by the figure of Timmis, with his disgust of women even while he loved one of them. But he shook away from that and told himself that if there was something lacking in his relations with his wife the fault must lie with him, for he at least had a certain scale of spiritual values, while she had none, nor, from her upbringing, could she have had the opportunity of discovering any in herself or her relations with those about her.
She said he thought too much, but without thought, without passionate endeavor, how could marriage fail to sink into brutish habit? Was that too fastidious? Since there is an animal element in human life, were it not as well to deal with it frankly and healthily on an animal level? That offended his logic. There could be no element in life that was not harmonious with every other element. The gross indulgence of sex had always been offensive to him, a stupid protraction of the heated imprisonment of adolescence, a calamity that must result in arrested development. Marriage had forced him to think about these things, and he was determined,so far as in him lay, to think about them clearly, without dragging in literature, or sentiment, or prejudice. In marriage, admittedly, lay the highest spiritual relationship known, or ever to be known, to human beings. In marriage, obviously, the body had its share. If the body’s share were regarded as separate from the rest, as an unfortunate but not unpleasant necessity, then, being separate, how could it be anything but a clog upon the full and true union? It was impossible for him to think of sex as a clot in the otherwise free mating of souls, and, indeed, his experience assured him that the exercise of his sex gave him not only the most wonderful deliverance from physical obsessions, but also from the uneasy and unprofitable brooding of the mind.
But he was uneasy and anxious in his marriage, came to believe that it was because his wife was content with so little when he desired to give her so much more, and blamed himself for his apparent inability to set forth his gift of emotion and human fellowship in terms that she could understand.
He went to see her play her part in the pantomime and suffered agonies of nervousness for her. She delivered her ten lines without mishap, sang her part in the quartet inaudibly, and her dance in the duet was applauded so loudly that at last the conductor tapped his little desk, and Matilda came tripping forth again with her comedian, bowed, kissed her hand, and went through the movements—absurd, banal, pointless as they were—with a shygrace and a breathless, childish pleasure that were charming. He was swept into the collective pleasure of the audience and clapped his hands with them and felt that the Matilda there on the stage was not his Matilda, but a creature belonging to another world, of whose existence he was aware, while nothing in his world could have any influence or any bearing on her whatsoever. . . . He would meet her at the stagedoor, and she would be his Matilda, while the other remained behind, as it were, inanimate in her charmed existence. Both were infused with life from the same source of life; the essence passed from one to the other, and therefore there was not one Matilda but three Matildas.
He lost himself in this mystic conception and was timely rescued by her meeting him as he passed through the vestibule. She took his arm and hugged it and asked him if he liked it.
“Wasn’t it good getting an encore? That dance has only been encored six times before.”
He told her how nervous he had been.
“I wasn’t a bit nervous once I was on, but in the wings it was awful.”
She said she wanted to take him behind the scenes so that he could see what a real theater was like. They passed through the stagedoor and along narrow, dusty passages, up steep flights of stone stairs, she chatting gaily in spite of the frequent notices enjoining silence, and every now and then they were stopped and Matilda was embraced by male and female alike, and all the women said how glad theywere, and the men said: “good egg” or “top hole.” Suddenly out of the narrow, dusty ways they came upon the stage, huge and eerie. There was only a faint light, the curtain was up, and there were tiny women in the auditorium dropping white cloths from the galleries and shrouding all the seats. Never had Old Mole had such a sense of emptiness and desolation. A man’s voice came from far up above the stage, and it sounded like a thin ghostly mocking. There was a creaking and a rasping, and a great sheet of painted canvas descended, the wings were set in place, and a flight of stairs was wheeled up and clamped: the scene was set for the opening of the pantomime. Suddenly the lights were turned on. Matilda began to hum the opening bars of the overture. Old Mole blinked. He was nearly blinded. The colors in the scenery glowed in the light. He had the most alarming sense of being cut off from his surroundings, of being projected, thrust forward toward the mysterious, empty auditorium with its shrouded seats and the little women bustling up and down in it. Almost irresistibly he was impelled to shout to them, to engage their attention, to make them look at him. His mind eased and a thrill of importance ran through him: never had he seemed to himself to bulk so large. He was almost frightened: the immense power of the machinery, the lighted stage and the darkened auditorium alarmed and weighed crushingly upon him.
“It’s like a vault,” said Matilda, “with no onein front. But when it’s full, on a Saturday night, hundreds and hundreds of faces, it’s wonderful.”
To him it was not at all like a vault, but like an engine disconnected from its power. The mind abhors a vacuum, and he was striving to fill the emptiness all about him, thronging the auditorium with imaginary people, and struggling to occupy the magic area of light in which he stood. In vain: he was impotent. He felt trapped.
“Let us go,” he said.
On the stairs they met the manager.
“Hullo, Tilly,” he said. “You’re a good girl.”
“Thanks.”
Old Mole hated the young man, for he was common and loose in manner and in no way worthy of the enchanted Matilda or of the marvelous organism, the theater, in which she seemed to live so easily and freely.
His thoughts were much too confused for him to impart them to her, and he was vastly relieved when they left the theater and she became his Matilda.
That night he read to her. He had been delighting in “Lucretius,” and he had marked passages, and he turned to that beginning:
“Iam iam non domus accipiet te læta, neque uxor Optima. . . .”
He translated for her:
“ ‘Now no more shall a glad home and a true wife welcome thee, nor darling children race tosnatch thy first kisses and touch thy heart with a sweet silent content; no more mayest thou be prosperous in thy doings and a defence to thine own; alas and woe!’ say they, ‘one disastrous day has taken all these prizes of thy life away from thee’—but thereat they do not add this, ‘and now no more does any longing for these things assail thee.’ This did their thought but clearly see and their speech follow they would deliver themselves from much burning of the heart and dread. ‘Thou, indeed, as thou art sunk in the sleep of death, wilt so be for the rest of the ages, severed from all weariness and pain.’ . . .
“Yet again, were the nature of things to utter a voice and thus with her own lips upbraid one of us, ‘What ails thee, O mortal, that thou fallest into such vain lamentation? Why weep and wail at death? For has thy past life and overspent been sweet to thee, and not all the good thereof, as though poured into a cracked pitcher, has run through and perished without joy, why dost thou not retire like a banqueter filled with life, and, calmly, O fool, take thy sleep? But if all thou hast had is perished and spilled and thy life is hateful, why seekest thou yet to add more which shall once again all perish and fall joylessly away? Why not rather make an end of life and labor? For there is nothing more that I can contrive and invent for thy delight; all things are the same forever. Even were thy body not yet withered, nor thy limbs weary and worn, yet all things remain the same, didst thou live on throughall the generations. Nay, even wert thou never doomed to die’—what is our answer?”