“My little one. Are there still the marks of your tears on your cheeks? There are still the bruises of my own obstinacy upon my barren old heart. I am here, miles away from you, in another country, but I am more with you than I have ever been. What a burden I must have been upon you! It must have been that I must selfishly have felt that. One wouldsuffer more from being a burden than from bearing a burden. (And you said: ‘Who will look after you?’ I think that rasped my blown vanity more than anything.) One would suffer more, I say, if one were a withered, parched, tedious old egoist, as I am. Tell me, are there still the marks of your tears on your cheeks? I cannot bear not to know. I love you. Now I know that I love you. If this world were fairyland, you would love me. But this world is this world. And it is the richer, as I am, by my love for you.H. J. B.”As feverishly and feather-headedly as a boy he skimmed upon the air to post this letter, and as he slipped it into the box he kissed the envelope, and as he did so he was overcome by a sense of the delicious absurdity of his love, of all love, and he bowed low and gravely to the Opera House and said:“You are a pimple on the face of the earth, my friend, but my love is the blood of its veins.”He packed his bag before he went to bed, was up very early in the morning, and, as soon as a certain shop in the Rue de la Paix was opened, went in and bought a necklace of crystals and emeralds. He was in London by six o’clock and half an hour later in the northern express. He reached Blackpool before his letter. The company and Matilda were gone. It was Sunday. The theater was closed and he had lost his card of the tour. Watts did not know. He never knew anything. Companies came and went and he stayed, as he said with his weak, watery smile, “right there,” only thankful that their damnabletunes were gone with them. Old Mole cursed him for an idiot and hunted up the stage doorkeeper, whose son was callboy and knew everything. He routed them out of bed, got the information he needed, and was off again as fast as a cross-country train could carry him.He broke in on Matilda as she was at breakfast, rushed at her boisterously. Through the long hours in the crawling train, with the dawn creeping gray, opal, ripe strawberry, over moors and craggy hills, he had contrived the scene, played a game of Consequences with himself, what he said to her and what she said to him, but Matilda peered at him and in a dull, husky voice said:“Oh! It’s you.”And fatuously he stood there and said:“Yes.”She was pale and weary and there were deep marks under her eyes. She said:“You didn’t leave me any money. It was important. We got here last night and then they told us there’d be no last week’s salary. They didn’t pay us on Friday. We traveled on Sunday as usual, and when we got here they told us. Some one in London’s done something. Enid”—that was the name of the knitting woman—“Enid looked awful when they told us, quite ill. I went home with her, and I’ve been up with her all night. She didn’t sleep a wink, but went on counting and counting out loud, like she used to do to herself in the train. . . . I’ve been up with her all night, but it wasn’t any good,because in the morning, when the dawn came, she got up and walked about and went into the next room, and when I went after her she was dead. And if I’d only had a little money. . . . She was a good woman and the only friend I had, and she killed herself.”He sat by her side and took her hand and soothed her.“But, my dear child, you had plenty of money of your own in the bank, and your own checkbook.”“I didn’t know I was to spend that. It was in the bank. You never told me what to do with the book.”And to find something to say, to draw her thoughts off the miserable tragedy, he explained to her the mysteries of banking, how, when you have more money than you can spend—she had never had it and found that hard to grasp—you pay it into your account and it is entered into a book, and how, if it is a great deal more than you can spend, you lend it to the bank and they pay you interest for it and lend it to other people. She began to grasp it at last and to see that the money was really hers and she would be putting no injury nor affront upon the bank by asking for some of it by means of a check. Then she said:“Have we a lot of money in the bank?”“Not an enormous quantity, but enough to go on without selling out.”“What does that mean?”He tried to explain the meaning of investments,of stocks and shares, but that was beyond her capacity and her immediate interest. She had begun to think practically of her money, and she said:“Some of these people have nothing at all.”And she made him show her how to write a check, and they hunted up all the poorer members of the company—those who had any money were already gone in search of work—and she gave them all enough to pay their rent and for their journey to their homes. Then she wrote to Enid’s husband and gave him all sorts of messages that had not been entrusted to her, said that thirty-five shillings had been found in Enid’s purse and sent that amount to him.They stayed for the inquest, and Enid’s husband came. He said what a good wife she had been to him, and what cruel times they had been through together, and how he couldn’t believe it, and it wasn’t like her to do such a thing, and she would have been another Florence St. John if she hadn’t married him, and he hadn’t got the name of a Jonah. “S’elp me God!” he said, “she was the right stuff on and off the stage, and them as hasn’t had cruel times and been a Jonah won’t ever understand what she’s been to me.” Through his incoherence there shone a beauty of dumb, humble and trusting love that now triumphed over death as it had triumphed over the monotonous, degrading slips and deprivations of life. Before it Old Mole bowed his head and felt a sort of envy, a regret that he, too, had not had cruel times and been a Jonah.Clumsily he tried to tell Matilda how he felt, but she could hardly bear to talk of Enid and closed every reference to her with:“If I had known I could have saved her. I ought to have known.”Even worse was it when he gave her the necklace.From the scene of the disaster they had moved to a little fishing village on the Yorkshire coast where they lodged in the cottage of a widow named Storm, perched halfway up a cliff, and from the windows they could see right over the North Sea, smooth as glass, with the herring fleet dotted like flies on its gleaming surface. Here, he thought, they could overcome their difficulties and relax the tension brought about by that last dark experience. There would be health in the wide sea and the huge cliffs and the moorland air. But it was the first time Matilda had been out of the crowd, and the peace and the emptiness induced brooding in her.When he gave her the necklace she took it out of its white satin and velvet case and fingered it and let the light play on it. Then it seemed to frighten her, and she asked how much it had cost. He told her.“It seems a sin,” said she, and put it back in its case.That night she received his letter and then only she seemed to understand why he had given her the necklace, and she came and patted his shoulder and kissed the top of his head. She began to talk of Enid, how she never complained and never said anunkind word of anybody, and how proud she was of two little trinkets, a brooch and a bangle, given her by her husband, which she said she had never pawned and never would.“The world seems upside down,” said Matilda.“No. No,” he protested. “It is all as it should be, as it must be. My dear child, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I hurt you, made things hard for you. I was seeing the world all wrong. Men and women seemed only toys. . . .”“But Enid used to say, you can’t expect anything from people when they have to think of money all day long.”“When did she say that?”“When her husband was out so long and didn’t write to her.”“Did she love him very much?”“Yes.”“And I love you.”“Yes. But. . . . It’s so different.”He looked at her and she met his gaze. In her eyes there was a strength, a determination, a depth that were new to her. It stimulated him, braced him, and he felt that something was awakened in her, something that demanded of him, demanded, insisted. He was ashamed of his letter, ashamed that he had given her the necklace, ashamed that when she demanded of him the glory of life he had thought no higher than to give her pleasure.So he was flung back into torment, and where before he saw humanity and its infinite variety assmaller than himself, now, with full swing to the opposite pole of exaggeration, he saw it as immeasurably larger and superior, full of a mighty purpose, ebbing and flowing like the sea, while, perched above the fringe of it, he cowered.He concealed his distress from her. He was not so far gone but he could delight in the scents and sounds of the country, and he would tramp away over the moors or along the cliffs by himself, lie in the heather and smoke and watch the clouds, real, full-bellied clouds, lumbering and far off shedding a gray gauze of rain. He would fill his lungs with the keen air and return home hungry to sup on plain cottage fare or delicious herrings fresh from the sea.One night, to please him, Matilda wore the necklace. It was pathetically out of place on her cheap little blouse, incongruous in their surroundings, the stiff, crowded fisherman’s parlor.It was that decided him. There must be an end of drifting. Sink or swim, they must endeavor to take their place in the world. They would go to London. If among the third-rate mummers who had been their company for so long Matilda could so wonderfully grow and expand, what might she not, would she not, do among gentler, riper souls? And, for himself, he would seek out a task. There must be in England men of active minds and keen imaginations, men among whom he could find, if not the answers to, at least an interest in, the questions that came leaping in upon him. They would go toLondon and make a home, and Matilda should be the mistress of it. She should live her own life, and he his, and there would be an end of the strain between them, and the beginnings of the most fruitful comradeship.Once again the immediate execution of his plans was frustrated. A strike was declared on the railways of Great Britain, and it became impossible for them to move, for they were on a branch line. Letters and newspapers were brought nine miles by road and there was no lack of food. The newspapers for a week devoted four columns to the story of the strike, then three columns, then two, then one. A little war broke out in the Persian Gulf. That dominated the strike, which lasted three weeks, and ended in the intervention of the Government, with neither the companies nor the men yielding.The village had its Socialists, the postman and the fish buyer, and, in the beginning of it, they talked excitedly of a general strike; the dockers would come out and the carters; every port would be closed, transport at a standstill; the miners would lay down their tools, and such frightful losses would be inflicted on the capitalists that they would be unable to pursue their undertakings. They would be taken out of their hands and worked by the laborers for the laborers, and then there would be the beginnings of justice upon the earth and the laborers would begin to enjoy the good things of the world. Old Mole asked them what they meant by the goodthings of the world, and the answer was strangely Hebraic—a land flowing with milk and honey, where men labored for six days (eight hours a day) and rested the seventh day, and had time to talk and think. They set an enormous value on talking and thinking, and all their enthusiasm was for “settling questions.” The land would be “settled,” and education, and housing, and insurance, and consumption, and lead poisoning. Each “question” was separated from every other; each existed apart from everything else, and each had its nostrum, the prescription for which was deferred until the destruction of the capitalists, and the liberation of the middle classes from their own middle classishness—(for these Socialists detested the middle classes even more than the capitalists)—had placed the ingredients in their hands. The “questions” had to be settled; the capitalists had created them, the middle classes, like sheep, accepted them; the “questions” had to be settled once for all, and therefore the capitalists had to be ruined and the middle classes squeezed in their pockets and stomachs until they surrendered and accepted the new ordering of the world in justice, brotherhood, and equality. Already the strike was doing damage at the rate of hundreds and thousands a week, and they had caught the bulk of the middle classes in their holidays, and thousands of them would be unable to get back to their work.In the thick of it Old Mole, to satisfy himself, walked over to that town which is advertised as the Queen of Watering Places. There were thousandsof the middle classes on the sands. Their children were sprawling on sand castles and dabbling in the thin washings of the sea. Fathers and mothers were lounging in deck chairs, sleeping under handkerchiefs and hats and umbrellas; grandmothers were squatting in charge of their grandchildren. Some of them were reading about the strike in the newspapers. At teatime the beach was cleared as though all human beings had been blown from it by a sea breeze. An hour later it was thickly thronged and the pierrots in their little open-air theater were playing to an enormous audience. The strike had prolonged their holiday; they were prepared to go on in its monotony instead of in the monotony of their work and domestic life. They were quite contented, dully acceptant. There were no trains? Very well, then; they would wait until there were trains. Respectable, well-behaved, orderly, genteel people do not starve. . . . And they were right.However, it set Old Mole thinking about his own means, the independence which he owed to no virtue nor talent, nor thrift of his own, but to a system which he did not understand, to sources which in the intricacies of their journey to himself were impossible to follow. Of the many enterprises all over the world, in the profits of which he had his share, he knew nothing at all. The reports that were sent to him were too boring or too technical to read. The postman and the fish buyer assured him that he was living upon the underpaid and overtaxed labors of thousands of unhappy men and women. He hadno reason for disbelieving them, but, on the whole, his sympathies were with the middle-classes, his attitude theirs; that respectable, well-behaved, orderly, genteel people do not starve. Not that he classed himself with them; he disliked the memory of his colleagues at Thrigsby, of the men at the golf club at Bigley more than anything, and at this time he was not moderate in his dislikes. He warmed to the enthusiasm of the Socialists, but was exasperated by the manner in which, after having made a clean sweep of everything except themselves and their kind, they could produce no constructive idea, but only a thin cerebral fluid, done up in different colored bottles as in a pharmacy. Just at the point when he found himself beginning to dream of a world of decent, kindly, human beings delivered (as far as possible) from their own folly and the tyrannies bred from it, they left humanity altogether and gloated hectically over their “questions.”If that were Socialism, he would have none of it; he preferred money. He told them so, and found that he had uttered the most appalling blasphemy. They said that Socialism was a religion, the religion that would save the world.Said Old Mole:“There have been Hebraism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Christianity, the worship of Isis and Osiris, the worship of the Bull, the Cat, the Snake, the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the Phallus; there have been prophets without number and martyrs more than I can say, saints for every day in theyear and more, and none of them has saved the world. More than that, I will go so far as to say that none of them has done as much to raise the standard of living as money.”“Damn it all,” said the fish buyer, “I’m not talking about superstitions. I’m talking about ideas.”“Money also is an idea,” replied Old Mole, “and it is as generally misunderstood as any other.”He was beginning to be rather excited, for he felt that he was getting the better of the argument, and would not allow himself to see that he had floundered on to the debater’s trick of shunting his opponents on to unfamiliar country. They had gone up and down one stretch of line, between two points—capitalism and labor—for so long, without looking on either side of them, that it needed only a very slight adjustment or transposition of terms to reduce them to a beating of the void. They clung to their point, and the postman at last said triumphantly:“But money isn’t a religion; Socialism is—the religion, the only religion of the working classes of this country. They’ve had enough of the next world; they want a bit o’ this for a change.”“So do I,” returned Old Mole, “all of it. I say that money is an idea, perhaps the only practicable idea in the world at present. It isn’t a religious idea simply because men as a whole are not religious. It has the advantage over your Socialism that it is a part of life as it is, while your religion,as you call it, is only a straining after the future life, an edifice without a foundation, for to bring about its realization you have to hew and cut and shape human nature to fit into the conditions of your fantasy. If I wanted to be a prophet, which I don’t—I should base my vision on money. There would be some chance then of everybody understanding it and really taking it into his life. If you could make money a religious idea—that is, make money a thing which men would respect and revere and abuse as little as possible—you would very likely produce something—deeds, not words and questions.”“Don’t you call the strike ‘doing something’?” cried the fish buyer.“We shall see,” replied Old Mole.The postman filled his cutty and laughed:“Don’t you see,” he said to the fish buyer, “that he is pulling your leg?”So, convinced of their superiority, they abandoned the discussion.His tussles with these Jeremiahs of the Yorkshire village gave Old Mole the confidence he needed, and the exultant glow of a sharpening of the wits, which are like razors, most apt to cut the wielder of them when they are most dull. He tortured himself no more with his failure to satisfy Matilda, but laid all his hopes in the future and the amusing life in London that he wished to create for her. Intensely he desired her to develop her own life, to grow into the splendid creature he now saw struggling beneath the crust of ignorance and prejudice and shyness andimmaturity that hemmed her in. There was such beauty in her, and he had failed to make it his, a part of himself, and in his blundering efforts to teach her, to lead her on to the realization and gift of herself, he had wounded her even when he most adored her. . . . The dead woman, Enid, had been more to her than he had ever been. He saw that now. She had known in that woman’s lift something that was not in her own, and she desired it; how much it was painful to see. She never looked for it in him, but gazed in upon herself in a sort of pregnancy of the soul. And, like a pregnant woman, she must be satisfied in her whimsies, she must have her desires anticipated, she must be given the color and brightness of life, now before her sensitiveness had passed away for want of fair impressions. These she had been denied in the young years of her life. She must have them. . . . She must have them. . . .She accepted his proposal to go to London without enthusiasm. She thought over it for some time and at last she said:“Yes. It will be best for you. I don’t want you to go away again.”And the night before they left, when the train-service was restored, she took out the necklace as she was undressing and tried it on, and looked at herself in the mirror and said:“I’d like to wear this in London. But I shall want an evening dress, sha’n’t I?”She smiled at him. His heart overflowed and colored the workings of his mind with a full humor. He thought:“If there be ideas, how better can they be expressed than in terms of Matilda?”VIN THE SWIMWhoever has an ambition to be heard in a crowd must press, and squeeze, and thrust, and climb, with indefatigable pains, till he has exalted himself to a certain degree of altitude above them.A TALE OF A TUBVIN THE SWIMTHEY stayed at first in one of the hotels designed to give provincials bed and breakfast for five shillings, for visitors to London do not mind in how much they are mulcted in pursuit of pleasure, but resent the payment of an extra farthing for necessaries. They were high up on the fifth floor and could see right over many roofs and chimneys to the dome of St. Paul’s. They saw the sights and lunched and dined in restaurants, and went by river to Greenwich, by tram to Kew, and Old Mole was forced to admit that it is possible to fall short of a philosophic conception of happiness and yet to have a very amusing time. It was Matilda’s ambition to go to every theater in London. She found it possible to enjoy everything, and therefore he was not bored.Sheer physical exhaustion brought their pleasure-seeking to an end, and they set about finding a habitation. On their arrival Old Mole had written to his brother, but had had no reply. At last a scrubby clerk arrived with a note:“So glad you have come to your senses. Come to lunch, 1.15.—R. B.”They went to lunch in Gray’s Inn, and after so much frequenting of public places it was deliciously peaceful to sink into private armchairs among personal belongings and a goodly company of books. Robert was very genial and kissed Matilda and delivered her over to his laundress for the inevitable feminine preparations for a meal. While she was away he told Old Mole that he had taken silk, and was retiring from the Bar, and building himself a house at Sunningdale, for the links, and was looking out for a suitable tenant. If Old Mole liked to keep a room for him he could have the place practically as it stood, on a two-thirds sharing basis. . . . It were hard to find, in London, a pleasanter place. The windows looked out onto the rookery, the rooms were of beautiful design and proportion, and there were eight of them altogether distributed over two floors, communicating by a charming oak-balustraded staircase.“I’ve lived here for thirty years,” said Robert, “and I’d like it kept in the family.”Old Mole was delighted. It saved all the vexation and discomfort of finding and furnishing a house, and here, ready-made, was the atmosphere of culture and comfort he was seeking and inwardly designing for the blossoming of Matilda.Robert beamed on her when she came in, and said:“We’ve made a plan.”She was properly excited.“Yes. You’re going to live here.”“Here? . . . Oh!” And she looked about among the pictures and the old furniture and the rich curtains and hangings, and timidly, shyly, as though she were not certain how they would take it, adopted them.They made her sit at the head of the table and placed themselves on either side of her, and, as Robert poured her out a glass of wine (Berncastler Doktor), he said:“You know, the old place has always wanted this.”“Wanted—what?” asked Matilda. “I think it’s perfect.”“A charming hostess,” said Robert, with an elaborate little bow of courtliness.A fortnight later saw Robert installed at Sunningdale and the Beenhams in occupation of his chambers. They shared only the dining-room; Old Mole had the upstairs rooms and Matilda those downstairs. It was his arrangement, and came from reaction against the closeness in which they had lived during the long pilgrimage from lodging to lodging.Once a fortnight Robert engaged Old Mole to play golf with him, and he consented because he desired to give Matilda as full a liberty as she could desire. In the alternate weeks Robert came to stay for two nights and occupied his room next to Old Mole’s. He would take them out to dinner and the theater, and after it the brothers would sit up yarning until the small hours, and always the discussion would begin by Robert saying:“ ’Pon my honor, women are extraordinary!” And then, completely to his own satisfaction, he would produce those generalizations which, in England, pass for a knowledge of human nature, and Old Mole would recognize them as old companions of his own. They were too absurd for anger, but Robert’s persistence would annoy him, and he would say:“When you live with a woman you are continually astonished to find that she is a human being.”“Human,” answered Robert, sweetening the sentiment with a sip of port, “with something of the angel.”“Angel be damned,” came in explosive protest, “women are just as human as ourselves, and rather more so.”“Ah!” said Robert, with blissful inconsequence, “but it doesn’t do to let ’em know it.”Robert’s contemptuous sentimentalization of women so bothered Old Mole that he sought to probe for its sources. Among the books in the chambers were many modern English novels, and he found nearly all of them, in varying formulæ, dealing axiomatically with woman as an extraneous animal unaccountably attached to the species, a creature fearfully and wonderfully ignorant of the affairs of the world, of her own physical processes, of the most elementary rules of health, morality, and social existence, capricious, soulless, unscrupulous, scheming, intriguing, concerned wholly and solely with marriage, if she were a “good” woman, withthe destruction of marriage if she were “bad”; at best being a sort of fairy—(Robert’s “angel”)—whose function and destiny were to pop the sugarplum of love into the mouths of virtuous men. The most extreme variant of this conception was to be found in the works of Robert Wherry, who, in a syrupy medium, depicted women as virginal mothers controlling and comforting a world of conceited, helpless little boys. Wherry was enormously successful, and he had many imitators, but none of them had his supreme audacity or his canny belief in the falsehood which was his only stock in trade. The trait of Wherry was upon all the novels in Robert’s collection. Even among the “advanced” novels the marks of the beast were there. They advanced not by considering life, but by protest against Wherry. They said, in effect, “Woman is not a mother, she is a huntress of men, or a social worker, or a mistress—(the conscious audacity in using that word!)—or a parasite, or a tyrant”; and one bold fellow said, “She has breasts”; he said it not once, but on every fifth page in every book. Old Mole found him even more disgusting than Wherry, who at least, in his dexterity, might be supposed to give pleasure to young girls and foolish, inexperienced persons of middle age—(like Robert)—and no great harm be done.To protect himself against the uncleanness of these books he took down “Rabelais,” which Robert kept tucked away on his highest shelf. And when he had driven off the torpor in his blood andthoughts induced by the slavishness of Robert’s modern literature, he told himself that it was folly to take it seriously:“There have always been bad books,” he said. “The good survive in the love of good readers. Good taste is always the same, but vicious taste is blown away by the cleansing winds of the soul.”All the same, he could not so easily away with modern literature, for he was suffering from the itch to write, and had already half-planned, being, like every one else, subject to the moral disease of the time, an essay on Woman. Wherry and the rest brought him up sharp: they made him very angry, but they made him perceive in himself many of the distressing symptoms he had found in them. He gave more thought to them, and, though he knew nothing of how these books were written, or of the conditions under which literature was at that time produced and marketed, he came to see these men and women as mountebanks in a fair, each shouting outside a little tent. “Come inside and see what Woman is like.” And some showed bundles of clothes, with nobody inside them; and some showed life-size dolls; and some showed women nude to the waist; and some showed women with bared legs; and some showed women in pink fleshings; and some showed naked women who had lost their modesty, and therefore could not be gazed upon without offence.He pondered his own essay, and recognized that its subject was not Woman, but Matilda. In thatgallery he could not show her, nor could he, without shame, display her to the public view. And therein, it seemed to him, he had touched the secret of all these lewd exhibitions. The displayers of them, in their impatient haste to catch the pennies of the public, or admiration, or whatever they might be desiring, were presenting, raw, confused and unimagined, their own unfelt and uncogitated experience, or, sometimes, an extension of their experience, in which, by an appalling logic, while they limned life as they would like to live it, they were led to the limits of unreason and egoistic folly. In presentation or extension, only those shows had any compelling force in which egoism was complete and entire lack of feeling relieved the showmen of fine scruples or human decency. Where shreds of decency were left they only served to show up the horrible obscenity of the rest.Looking at it in this light—and there seemed no other way of correlating this literature with human life—Old Mole was distressed.“It is bad enough,” he thought, “when they make a public show of their emotions, but when they parade emotions they never had, that is the abomination of desolation.”Matilda read some of them. She gulped them down at the rate of two in an evening, but when he tried to discuss them with her she had nothing to say about them. To her they were just stories, to be read and forgotten. He tried to persuade himself that she was right, at any rate more sensiblethan himself, but could get no further than the admission of the fact that she had no feeling for literature and would just as soon read a cash-made piece of hackwork as a masterpiece. That led him back to the subject of his essay and woman’s indifference to ideas and idealism. He had been considering it as a general proposition, but he was forced to admit that it was in truth only Matilda’s indifference to his own ideas, and he was not at all sure but she possessed something much more valuable, a power to assimilate ideas when they had taken flesh and become a part of the life that is lived. He knew that he was using her as a test, a touchstone, and through her he had learned to tolerate many things which his reason scouted. As a practical criterion for life and living (two very different things, as he was beginning dimly to perceive)—she was very valuable to him, but it was when he passed on to the things of art and found himself faced with the need of getting or begetting clear conceptions of phenomena, in his search for the underlying, connecting and resolving truth, that she failed him. She said he thought too much. Perhaps he did, but it was a part of his way of living, and he could not rest content with his relation with her, except he had also his idea of her. It was a relief to him, and he felt he was greatly advanced along the road by which he was traveling when he found her in the National Gallery among the five singing women of theNativityof Piero della Francesca. That discovery gave her an existence in the world of art.He told her about the picture and took her to see it.“Good Lord!” she said. “Is that what you think I’m like?”She had thrilled to London. She used to say she would like to go back into the provinces just to have again the pleasure of arriving at the station and coming out into the roar of the traffic and the wonderful London smell. The shops had bowled her over. Cities she had known where there was one street of elegant shops, towns where there might be one shop whose elegance lifted it high above all the rest, but here there were miles and miles of them. She discovered them for herself, and then took her husband to see the magical region of Oxford Street and Regent Street. In Bond Street they saw a necklace just like hers, and a most elegant young man went into the shop and the necklace was taken out of the window. She saw hats and coats and tailor-mades that she bought “in her mind,” as she said, for she was still scared of money, and he could not induce her to be anything but frugal. (She would walk a mile to save a penny bus fare.) . . . When they went into Gray’s Inn and Robert removed his curtains and some of his furniture, she asked if she might buy some of her things herself, and they visited the great stores. She quickly lost her awe of them, and when she had drawn two or three checks for amounts staggering to her who had lived all her life cooped in by a weekly financial crisis, sheapplied her mind to the problem, and did many little sums on scraps of paper to reassure herself that she had not shaken the bank’s faith in her stability and honesty. It ceased to be a miracle to her, but she hated drawing checks to herself, for cash vanished so easily and unaccountably, while for checks made payable to tradespeople she always had something to show. In this state of mind she decided, and, as something momentous, announced her decision to buy an evening dress. It was no light undertaking. A week passed before she found the material, and when she had bought it—(for in her world you always had dresses “made up”)—she was doubtful of her taste, and as dubious of Old Mole’s. She bought theEraand looked up the address of the second girl in the pantomime, who remained to her the smartest woman of her acquaintance. Curiosity as to the address in Gray’s Inn brought the “second girl” flying to her aid; she was delighted to be of use and undertook to show Matilda the ins and outs of the shops and “the dear old West End.” She gave counsel as to trimming, knew of an admirable dressmaker near Hanover Square, “ever so cheap.” The dressmaker also sold hats, and Matilda bought hats for herself and her friend. The dressmaker also sold opera cloaks, and Matilda bought an opera cloak. The dress and the cloak necessitated, enforced, finer stockings, shoes, gloves than any Matilda possessed, and these also she purchased. . . . When all these acquisitions came home she laid them out on her bed and gazed at them in alarm andpleasure. It was the middle of the afternoon, but she changed every stitch of her clothing and donned everything new, the dress and the opera cloak, the necklace, and, as she had seen the ladies do in the theater, she wore a ribbon through her hair. In this guise Old Mole surprised her. He was ravished by her loveliness, but was so taken aback by all these secret doings, so tickled by her simplicity, that he laughed. He laughed indulgently, but he sapped her confidence, reduced all her pleasure to ashes, and there were tears, and she wished she had never come to London, and she knew she was not good enough for him, but he need not so plainly tell her so nor scorn her when she tried to make herself so: other women had pretty clothes, women, too, who were hard put to it to make a living.He soothed her and said if she would wear her silks and fine array he would take her out next time Robert came.“I don’t want to go out with Robert.”“Why not?”“If I’m not good enough to know your sister, I’m not good enough to know your brother.”“That isn’t reasonable.”She was ruffled and hot, and in her heart annoyed with him for coming in on her like that, for she had planned to take him by surprise on their first evening’s pleasuring. She did not want to be soothed, and preferred sparring.“Your sister’s in town, isn’t she?”“Yes.”“Have you seen her?”“No.”“You have.”“I have not.”He knew why she was sparring; he knew that to disappoint a woman in the vanity of her clothes is more immediately dangerous than to treat her with deliberate insult or cruelty, but he was exacerbated by her unfair onslaught on Robert, and he was sore at the attitude taken toward him by his family. Robert had done his best, but the rest were implacable; they would not admit his right to his own actions independent of their opinion. Not content with holding their opinion, they communicated it to him in the most injurious letters, written at intervals most nicely calculated for his annoyance. To a philosopher in search of tolerance and an open mind all this had been ruffling.The quarrel blew over. Matilda dried away her tears, and he begged her pardon and promised to give her another evening dress finer even than that, made at a real, smart, fashionable, expensive dressmaker’s. . . . Shyly and diffidently they entered a famous house in Albemarle Street and were told that without an introduction the firm could not make for madam. A splendid cocotte in glorious raiment swept by them and out into the street. She had a little spaniel in her arms and a silver-gray motorcar was awaiting her. Into this she mounted and was whirled away. With something of both contempt and envy the stately young woman who had receivedthem gazed after this vision of wealth and insolence. Old Mole and Matilda felt very small and crept away.Old Mole said:“The wealth of London is amazing. A man would need at least ten thousand a year to amuse himself with a woman like that.”Matilda said:“A creature like that!”And a little later she said:“I think I’ll wait for my dress.”However, she had not to wait, for Old Mole gave the story to Robert, who, with a nice sense of the fitness of things, told his sister that he wished to buy a dress for a friend of his, and, armed with her introduction, he and Matilda went and ordered a gown at an establishment even more exclusive than that in Albemarle Street. This establishment was so select that only the most indubitably married or otherwise guaranteed ladies were served; one there obtained the French style without the suspicion of French Frenchness.The quarrel blew over, but the sensibilities of both were rasped, and they were cautious and wary with one another, which is perhaps the greatest trial of the blessed state of matrimony. He labored to be just to her, to endeavor to understand her. She was, he confessed, in a difficult position, lifted above her kind—though it was inconceivable that she could ever have met the fate or assumed the condition of her sister, Mrs. Boothroyd—and not adopted intohis. He was self-outlawed, driven out of the common mind of his class, and, so far as he could see, of his country, into his own, and therein he had as yet discovered no habitation, not even a site whereon to build. She could not share his adventures and sorrows, and, except himself and Robert, had no companionship. He asked her if she had no acquaintance in London, and she confessed to the “second girl,” Milly Dufresne. He proposed that she should ask Miss Dufresne to dinner to provide the occasion for the wearing of her new gown. She said she did not suppose he would care for Miss Dufresne, but he protested that her friends were of course his and he was only too delighted that she had a companion of her own sex and age.The day was fixed (her birthday), the dinner ordered and arranged, a man hired for the evening to do the waiting. Without a word being said, it was assumed that there should be the ceremony due to the necklace and the French (style) gown.As he considered all these preparations, Old Mole thought amusedly that they were not at all for Miss Dufresne and Robert (who had been invited), but rather a homage paid to their possessions, and, searching within himself for the causes of the comfort and satisfaction he felt, he found that this dinner was the first action which had brought them into harmony with the London atmosphere. Ethically there was nothing to be said for such a pretence at hospitality; but as submission to the æsthetic pressure of their surroundings, as expedience, it wasquite wonderfully right. It was the thin end of the wedge, the first turn of the gimlet in the boring of the bunghole of the fat barrel of London existence; and, if it were their fate to become Londoners, they were setting about it with sufficient adroitness. He was only afraid that Miss Dufresne would lead him back into the atmosphere of the theater from which he was so relieved to have escaped. The theater that he had known was only an excrescence on English life, a whelk or a wen on its reputable bald head. He had perched on it like a fly, but his concern, his absorbing concern, was to get at the brains inside that head and the thoughts inside the brain.On the morning of the day fixed for the dinner Robert wired that he could not come, and Old Mole was left with the awful prospect of tackling Miss Dufresne alone. His recollection of her was of a most admirably typical minx with an appetite for admiration and flattery that had consumed all her other desires.“Lord save us!” he said. “I was baffled by that type as a young man; what on earth can I do with it in my fifties?”And in his heart he was fearful of spoiling Matilda’s pleasure. This dread so oppressed him that, finding her flurried and irritable with the work of preparation, he decided to absent himself, to lunch at Robert’s club, of which he had just been elected a member, and to soothe himself with a walk through Whitehall and the parks in the afternoon.As he walked—it was a fine spring day with themost beautiful changing lights and a sweet breeze—he congratulated himself on the wisdom of having come to London. Marriage might be difficult—there was no warrant, Scriptural or other, for expecting it to be easy—but at least in London there was interest. There was not the unrelieved sordidness of other English cities. There was a tradition, some attempt to maintain it, graciousness, a kind of dignity—it might be the dignity of a roast sirloin of beef, but dignity it certainly was—here and there traces of manners, and leisure not altogether swamped by luxury. Coming from Thrigsby was like leaving the racket of the factory for the elegant shop in which the finished articles were sold. He liked that simile, and there he left his speculations concerning London. He was not at his ease in this kind of thinking; a thought was only valuable to him when it was successfully married to an emotion to produce an image. For London he could find no image, and when he thought of England he was taken back to his most vivid emotion, that when in the caravan with Copas they had breasted the hill and come in view of the Pennine Range: but this was a mere emotion mated with no thought. As for the Empire, it simply had no significance. It was a misnomer, or rather, a name given to an illusion, or, at best, a generalization. It was certainly not an entity, but only the impossible probability of a universally accepted fiction. He could not accept it, nor could he accept the loose terminology of the politicians. For this reason he could never now readthe newspapers except for the cricket and football news in which his interest was maintained by habit.Less and less was he interested in things and ideas that were not immediately human, and therefore fluid and varying in form and color as clouds and trees in the wind and birds in the air—and human beings on the earth. Rigid theory and fixed conceptions actually hurt him; they were detached, dead, like windfall fruit rotting on the ground, and everywhere, in books, in the newspapers, in public speeches, he saw them gathered up and stored, because it was too much trouble to take the ripe fruit from the tree, or to wait for the hanging fruit to ripen, or because (he thought) men walk with their eyes to the ground, even as he had done, and see nothing of the beauty above and around them. And, thinking so, he would feel an impulse to arise and shout and waken men, but then, regretfully, he would admit that he was too old to surrender to this impulse, and would think too much before he spoke, and would end by prating like Gladstone or roaring like Tom Paine.It seemed to him that the character of London was changed or changing. He delighted especially in the young men and women, who walked with a new swagger, almost with freedom, and adorned themselves with gay, bold colors. The young women especially were limber in their movements, marvelously adroit in dodging their hampering garments. Their bodies were freer. They had not the tight, trussed appearance of the young women of his ownday and generation. He delighted especially in the young women of London. They gave him hopefulness.He was pleased to see that the young men delighted in them, also. They walked with their arms in the arms of the young women in a fine, warm comradeship, whereas, in his day, and not so long ago neither, the girls had placed a timid little hand in the arms of their swains and been towed along in a sort of condescension. It pleased him to see the young men frankly, and in spite of themselves and their dignity and breeding, give the proper involuntary salute to passing youth and beauty. . . . As he sat in St. James’s Park a deliciously pretty girl passed by him, and she repeated nothing of the full homage he paid her, but then came a tall young man, sober and stiff, in silk hat and tail coat. They passed, the young man and the young woman: a lifting of the shoulders in the young man, a tilt of the head in the young woman, a half-smile of pleasure, and they went their ways. The young man approached Old Mole. He gave a little start and up went his hand in the old school salute. Old Mole rose to his feet.“My dear fellow. . . .”It was A. Z. Panoukian.He said:“Well, sir——”They sat down together. Panoukian bore the old expression which had always overcast his face when there were discoverable laches in his conduct, andOld Mole felt himself groping for the mood of jocular severity with which he had been wont to meet that expression.“Well, sir, I never thought——”Old Mole found the formula:“Panoukian, what have you been up to?”“Well, sir, I’m jolly glad to have met you, because I didn’t know what you might have heard.”“Pray, Panoukian, forget that I was ever your schoolmaster. I am no longer an academic person, though there are distressing traces of my old profession in my outlook.”Panoukian had heard the story, and a grin spread across his face. That made things easier. He plumped out a full confession and personal history.He had been a rank failure at Oxford. He had no one but himself to blame, of course. Perhaps he had not given the place a fair trial, but at the end of his fourth term he had decided that it was no use going on, and removed himself. It was partly, he thought, that he could not endure Tibster, and partly that he had lost all power of concentrating on his work.“I don’t know,” he said, “but at school there was always something to work for, to get to Oxford. When I got there I seemed to shoot ahead of it, to see beyond it, and in the place itself I could find nothing but Tibster and the Tibsterian mind, cut off from the world outside and annoyed because that world has a voluptuousness which is not in its own little box. I think I changed physically, grew a newkidney or another lobe of the brain. Anyhow, the world shrank and I became very large and unwieldy, and there was nothing positive in my existence except my dislike of Tibster.”“Did you smoke a great deal?” asked Old Mole.“Only after the crisis.”“Did you make a verse translation of the Odyssey?”“Only the first four books.”“I imagine, if you had taken your symptoms to Tibster, he would have put you right. The university has that effect on sensitive undergraduates, especially on non-Public School men. A sudden growth, a swift shooting from boyhood into the beginnings of manhood. It is very touching to watch; but Tibster must have seen it happen so often that it would be difficult for him to notice that it was happening to you more violently than usual.”“I never thought of it from Tibster’s point of view.”“My dear Panoukian, I am only just beginning to see your affairs from your point of view, or, indeed, to admit that you have a point of view at all. . . . I hope it was not a great disappointment to your father.”Panoukian said his father had died during his second term. He had been attached to his father and was with him at the end, and perhaps that was what began the crisis. The business had gone to his brothers, but he was left enough to live on, and that was how he came to be in London. For the timebeing he was acting as secretary, unpaid, to Tyler Harbottle, M. P. for North Thrigsby and an old friend of his father’s. Old Mole remembered Harbottle, a butter merchant in Thrigsby and president of the Literary Society, the Field Society, the Linnæan Society, the Darwin Club, the Old Fogies, and the Ancient Codgers, and formerly a member of the Art Gallery Committee, and, in that capacity, provocative of the outcry on the purchase of a picture by so advanced and startling a painter as Puvis de Chavannes. He asked Panoukian how he liked the House of Commons, and Panoukian said it was full of Tibsters with soap and chemicals and money on their brains instead of Greek and Latin and book philosophy.“Harbottle is a Tibster, with a little nibbling mind, picking here and there, not because he is hungry, but because he is afraid some one else will get the pieces if he doesn’t. I went to him because I wanted to work; but it isn’t work, it’s just getting in other people’s way. And there are swarms of Harbottles in the House. I sometimes think that the whole of politics is nothing but Harbottling. It would be all very well to have the brake hard on if the country were going to Hell, but when it is a matter of a long, stiff hill it is heartrending.”And with a magnificent gesture he swept all the Tibsters and Harbottles away. Old Mole found his enthusiastic, sweeping condemnation very refreshing. There was youth in it, and he was beginning to value youth above all things. Above wisdom andexperience? At least above the caution of inexperience.Clearly Panoukian was prepared to go on talking, to leave Harbottle to go on nibbling without his aid, but Old Mole had begun to feel a chill, and rose to go. Panoukian was also going toward the India Office—Harbottle was corresponding with the Secretary about two Parsees who had been refused their right of appeal to the Privy Council—and so far they went together. As they parted Old Mole remembered Matilda’s dinner party and Miss Dufresne. Panoukian seemed an excellent buffer. He invited him, and from the eagerness with which the invitation was accepted he surmised that Panoukian was rather lonely in London. Then he felt glad that he had asked him.The party was very successful. Matilda was delighted to have another male, and that a young one, to admire her fine feathers, and Panoukian was obviously flattered and deliciously alarmed to meet a real live actress who confirmed him in his superstitious notions of the morals of the stage by flirting with him at sight. He was not very skilful in his response, but a very little subjugation was enough to satisfy Miss Dufresne: she only needed to know that she could an she would. He was very shy, and, with him, shyness ran to talkativeness. With Matilda he was like a schoolboy; his attitude toward her was a softening and rounding with chivalry of his attitude toward Old Mole. He hardly everspoke to her without calling her Mrs. Beenham: “Yes, Mrs. Beenham”—“Don’t you think so, Mrs. Beenham?”—“As I was saying to your husband, Mrs. Beenham. . . .” When he left he summoned up courage to ask Old Mole if he would bring Mrs. Beenham to tea with him. He lived in the Temple and had a wonderful view of St. Paul’s and the river. Old Mole promised he would do so, and asked him to come in whenever he liked.“It’s awfully good of you,” said Panoukian, and with that he went off with Miss Dufresne, who had engaged him to see her into a taxi. Matilda stood at the head of the stairs and watched them go down.“Good night, dearie,” called Miss Dufresne, and Panoukian, looking up, saw Matilda bending over.“Good night, Mrs. Beenham,” he cried.Matilda, returning to the study, said:“What a nice voice that boy has got.”“I used to expect great things of Panoukian,” said Old Mole, “but then neither he nor I had seen beyond Oxford.”“Is he very clever?”“He used to have the sort of cleverness schoolmasters like. It remains to be seen whether he has the sort of cleverness the world needs. He is very young.”“Not soveryyoung.”“Like your party?”“Oh, yes.”“You looked very pretty.”“Thank you, sir.”“Good girl. What about bed?”But she was loth to move. She began several topics, but soon dropped them. At last she plunged:“Millie’s going into a new piece. It’s a real play this time. It’s about the stage and there are to be a lot of chorus girls in it. She says she could get me in easily.”Old Mole took this in silence.“I won’t go if you don’t like it,” she said.“Have you said you would go?”“Yes, yes.”“Do you want to?”“What else is there for me to do?”Indeed, what was there? He was saddened and angry at the use of the argument. He had wanted her to feel free, to come and to go, so long only as she treated him with frankness, and here he had so far failed that she had made arrangements to return to the theater and then asked for hispost factoconsent. What was it that kept her in awe of him? Not his thoughts of her, nor his feeling for her, so far as he knew either. . . . He kissed her good night and sat sadly brooding over it all: but it was too difficult for him, and he was tired and his humor would not come to his aid. He sought refuge in books, but they yielded him none, and at last Panoukian’s phrase recurred to him:“Perhaps,” he said, “perhaps I am a Harbottler in marriage, nibbling at love. God help me if I am.”He thought surely he had reached the worst. But Fate is inexhaustibly ingenious. He was to have his bellyful of Harbottling.Among his letters on the morning after the party he found one, the envelope of which bore in print the name of Langley Brown, Literary and Dramatic Agent, 9 Coventry Street, W. This letter informed him that Mr. Henry Butcher, of the Pall Mall Theater, proposed to immediately produce—(the split infinitive is Mr. Langley Brown’s)—a play called “Lossie Loses,” by Carlton Timmis, the rights of which Mr. Brown believe to be in Mr. Beenham’s hands. And would Mr. Beenham call on Mr. Brown, or, if not, write to give his consent, when the contract would be drawn up and the play produced.He had almost forgotten Carlton Timmis. The letter had been forwarded through his banker. He stared at it, turned it over and over, read it again. It seemed to be an authentic document. He handed it to Matilda. She said with awe:“Mr. Butcher!”And, with unconscious imitation of the humor of the English Bench, Old Mole asked:“Who is Mr. Butcher?”This was shocking ignorance. For twenty years and more Mr. Henry Butcher’s name had been in the newspapers, on the hoardings, and his portrait, his wife’s portrait, his baby’s portrait, his dog’s portrait,his horse’s portrait had appeared in the magazines, and his commendation of a certain brand of cigarette had for the last ten years been used by the makers as an advertisement. For all that, his name and personality had not penetrated Old Mole’s consciousness.“Did you buy the play?” asked Matilda.“I lent him fifty pounds, and he left it with me. I had no very clear idea as to his intention.”“Is it a good play?”“You shall read it.”He unearthed it with some difficulty and gave it to her. She read it and wept over it.“Is it a good play?” he asked.“I don’t know, but it’s a lovely part.”He went to see Mr. Brown, a flashy little Cockney who peppered him with illustrious literary names and talked about everything but the business in hand. Old Mole asked where Timmis might be, and Mr. Brown said he had heard from him only once, and that from a place called Crown Imperial, in British Columbia.“A good fellow, Timmis, but cracked. Impatient, you know. I never can make young writers see that they’ve got to wait until the old birds drop off the perch before their masterpieces can come home to roost.”“Is ‘Lossie Loses’ a masterpiece?” asked Old Mole innocently.“Between ourselves,” replied the agent, “I don’tthink there’s much in it. But Mr. Butcher has been having a lean period lately and wanted something cheap, and thought he’d try a new author.”He produced the contract. Old Mole read it through in a sort of dream and signed it. He was shown out with a hearty handshake, and that very evening he received from Mr. Brown a check for ninety pounds—a hundred in advance of royalties less 10 per cent. commission. He was disconcerted. There was some uncanny wizardry in it that, by merely walking into an office and signing a paper, one could at the end of the day be the richer by ninety pounds with never a stroke of work done for it. His first impulse was to give the check to Matilda, but, on reflection, he decided to give her forty and to keep the fifty for Timmis if he could be found. He looked up Crown Imperial, British Columbia, on the map and in the gazetteer, but there was no mention of it, and, concluding that it must be a new place, he wrote to Timmis there in the hope of catching him. When he had posted his letter he remembered that Timmis might have dropped his stage name, and wrote another letter to Cuthbert Jones. Then he brushed the play from his mind.Within a fortnight it was impossible to walk along any of the main thoroughfares of London without seeing the words “Lossie Loses,” with the name of Mr. Henry Butcher in enormous letters, and the name of Carlton Timmis in very small print.For the first night Old Mole received, with Mr. Butcher’s compliments, a ticket for Box B. Panoukian and Robert came to dinner. Matilda wore her first evening dress and the opera cloak, a red ribbon in her hair, and graced the front of the box with the three men behind her.There is a certain manner appropriate to a seat in the front of a box—a consciousness that is not quite self-consciousness, a certain setting back of the shoulders, a lifting of the head, a sort of shy brazenness, an acceptance of being part of the show, and, for all the pit knows, a duchess. Matilda had caught it to perfection and turned a dignified profile to the opera glasses directed upon her. Panoukian pointed out the political personages in the stalls, and, being a great reader of those glossy photographic papers, which are perhaps the most typical product of the time, was able to recognize many of the literary and artistic celebrities of the moment. Actresses glided fussily to their seats, smiling acknowledgment to the applause of the groundlings. There was a bobbing up and down, a bowing and a smiling, a waving of programs and fans from acquaintance to acquaintance, a chatter and hum of many voices that drowned the jigging overture, and went droning on into the first few moments of the play.Old Mole’s memory of it was hazy, but sufficiently alive to quarrel with some of the impressions he now had of it and to enable him to distinguish between the work of the actors and the work of the author. The play was worse and better than hehad thought. In his recollection it was not so entirely unscrupulous in its appeal to the surface emotions, nor so extraordinarily adroit in sliding off into a dry, sly and perfectly irrelevant humor just at the moment when those base appeals looked as though they were going to be pushed so far as to offend even the thickest sensibilities. Each curtain was brought down with a neat, wistful little joke, except at the end of the third act, when, in silence, Lossie, the little unloved heroine of the play, prepared to cook the supper for the husband who had just left her. In the fourth act he came back and ate it, so that all ended happily. The atmosphere was Lancashire, and the actors spoke Scots, Irish, Belfast, Somerset, and Wigan, but that did not seem to matter. The actress who played Lossie spoke with a very good Thrigsby accent, and her performance was full of charm. She had a fine voice and knew how to use it, and her awkwardness of gesture suited the uncouthness with which the Lancashire folk were endowed. She and the sad little jokes carried all before them, and there was tremendous applause at the end of each act and the close of the play.Mr. Henry Butcher made a grateful little speech, and, looking toward Old Mole’s box, said the author was not in the house. All eyes were turned toward the box, and the shouting was renewed.Entirely unconscious of the attention and interest they were arousing, the party escaped. Robert was hungry and insisted on having oysters. As they atethem they discussed the play. Robert and Matilda were enthusiastic, Old Mole was dubious and depressed, and Panoukian contemptuous.“I’ve seen worse,” he said, “but nothing with quite so much effrontery. It was like having your face dabbed with a baby’s powder puff. I felt all the time that in a moment they would have a child saying its prayers on the stage. But they never did, and there was extraordinary pleasure in the continual dread of it, and the continual sense of relief. And every now and then they made one laugh. I believe it will succeed.”It succeeded. The critics unanimously agreed that the new play had charm, and, said one of them: “It is with plays, as with women; if they have charm, you need look no further. All London will be at Lossie’s feet.”At the end of the first week Old Mole received a check for one hundred and ten pounds; at the end of the second a check for one hundred and twenty-five. He sent two cablegrams to Carlton Timmis and Cuthbert Jones at Crown Imperial, British Columbia. No answer. Timmis (or Jones) had disappeared.Money poured in.The play was bought by cable for America, and five hundred pounds passed into Old Mole’s account. It became almost a horror to him to open his letters lest they should contain a check.Worst of all, the newspapers scented “copy.” Asuccessful play, a vanished author, no one to claim the fame and fortune lying there. One paper undertook to find Carlton Timmis. It published photographs of him, scraps of biography and anecdotes, but Timmis remained hidden, and the newspapers yelled, in effect, “Where is Timmis? The public wants Timmis. Wireless has tracked a murderer to his doom, surely it cannot fail to reveal the whereabouts of the public’s new darling?” Another journal found its way to the heart (i.e.,the box office) of the theater and asked in headlines, “Is Butcher Paying Royalties?” Butcher wrote to say that he was paying royalties to the owner of the play, whose name was not Carlton Timmis. And at last a third newspaper announced the name of the beneficiary of the play—H. J. Beenham. Gray’s Inn was besieged. Old Mole was in despair and declared that they would have to pack up and go away until the uproar had died down, but, more sensibly, Matilda invited a journalist in, gave him a drink, and told him the little there was to tell. The next check was for a hundred and eighty pounds.
“My little one. Are there still the marks of your tears on your cheeks? There are still the bruises of my own obstinacy upon my barren old heart. I am here, miles away from you, in another country, but I am more with you than I have ever been. What a burden I must have been upon you! It must have been that I must selfishly have felt that. One wouldsuffer more from being a burden than from bearing a burden. (And you said: ‘Who will look after you?’ I think that rasped my blown vanity more than anything.) One would suffer more, I say, if one were a withered, parched, tedious old egoist, as I am. Tell me, are there still the marks of your tears on your cheeks? I cannot bear not to know. I love you. Now I know that I love you. If this world were fairyland, you would love me. But this world is this world. And it is the richer, as I am, by my love for you.H. J. B.”
“My little one. Are there still the marks of your tears on your cheeks? There are still the bruises of my own obstinacy upon my barren old heart. I am here, miles away from you, in another country, but I am more with you than I have ever been. What a burden I must have been upon you! It must have been that I must selfishly have felt that. One wouldsuffer more from being a burden than from bearing a burden. (And you said: ‘Who will look after you?’ I think that rasped my blown vanity more than anything.) One would suffer more, I say, if one were a withered, parched, tedious old egoist, as I am. Tell me, are there still the marks of your tears on your cheeks? I cannot bear not to know. I love you. Now I know that I love you. If this world were fairyland, you would love me. But this world is this world. And it is the richer, as I am, by my love for you.
H. J. B.”
As feverishly and feather-headedly as a boy he skimmed upon the air to post this letter, and as he slipped it into the box he kissed the envelope, and as he did so he was overcome by a sense of the delicious absurdity of his love, of all love, and he bowed low and gravely to the Opera House and said:
“You are a pimple on the face of the earth, my friend, but my love is the blood of its veins.”
He packed his bag before he went to bed, was up very early in the morning, and, as soon as a certain shop in the Rue de la Paix was opened, went in and bought a necklace of crystals and emeralds. He was in London by six o’clock and half an hour later in the northern express. He reached Blackpool before his letter. The company and Matilda were gone. It was Sunday. The theater was closed and he had lost his card of the tour. Watts did not know. He never knew anything. Companies came and went and he stayed, as he said with his weak, watery smile, “right there,” only thankful that their damnabletunes were gone with them. Old Mole cursed him for an idiot and hunted up the stage doorkeeper, whose son was callboy and knew everything. He routed them out of bed, got the information he needed, and was off again as fast as a cross-country train could carry him.
He broke in on Matilda as she was at breakfast, rushed at her boisterously. Through the long hours in the crawling train, with the dawn creeping gray, opal, ripe strawberry, over moors and craggy hills, he had contrived the scene, played a game of Consequences with himself, what he said to her and what she said to him, but Matilda peered at him and in a dull, husky voice said:
“Oh! It’s you.”
And fatuously he stood there and said:
“Yes.”
She was pale and weary and there were deep marks under her eyes. She said:
“You didn’t leave me any money. It was important. We got here last night and then they told us there’d be no last week’s salary. They didn’t pay us on Friday. We traveled on Sunday as usual, and when we got here they told us. Some one in London’s done something. Enid”—that was the name of the knitting woman—“Enid looked awful when they told us, quite ill. I went home with her, and I’ve been up with her all night. She didn’t sleep a wink, but went on counting and counting out loud, like she used to do to herself in the train. . . . I’ve been up with her all night, but it wasn’t any good,because in the morning, when the dawn came, she got up and walked about and went into the next room, and when I went after her she was dead. And if I’d only had a little money. . . . She was a good woman and the only friend I had, and she killed herself.”
He sat by her side and took her hand and soothed her.
“But, my dear child, you had plenty of money of your own in the bank, and your own checkbook.”
“I didn’t know I was to spend that. It was in the bank. You never told me what to do with the book.”
And to find something to say, to draw her thoughts off the miserable tragedy, he explained to her the mysteries of banking, how, when you have more money than you can spend—she had never had it and found that hard to grasp—you pay it into your account and it is entered into a book, and how, if it is a great deal more than you can spend, you lend it to the bank and they pay you interest for it and lend it to other people. She began to grasp it at last and to see that the money was really hers and she would be putting no injury nor affront upon the bank by asking for some of it by means of a check. Then she said:
“Have we a lot of money in the bank?”
“Not an enormous quantity, but enough to go on without selling out.”
“What does that mean?”
He tried to explain the meaning of investments,of stocks and shares, but that was beyond her capacity and her immediate interest. She had begun to think practically of her money, and she said:
“Some of these people have nothing at all.”
And she made him show her how to write a check, and they hunted up all the poorer members of the company—those who had any money were already gone in search of work—and she gave them all enough to pay their rent and for their journey to their homes. Then she wrote to Enid’s husband and gave him all sorts of messages that had not been entrusted to her, said that thirty-five shillings had been found in Enid’s purse and sent that amount to him.
They stayed for the inquest, and Enid’s husband came. He said what a good wife she had been to him, and what cruel times they had been through together, and how he couldn’t believe it, and it wasn’t like her to do such a thing, and she would have been another Florence St. John if she hadn’t married him, and he hadn’t got the name of a Jonah. “S’elp me God!” he said, “she was the right stuff on and off the stage, and them as hasn’t had cruel times and been a Jonah won’t ever understand what she’s been to me.” Through his incoherence there shone a beauty of dumb, humble and trusting love that now triumphed over death as it had triumphed over the monotonous, degrading slips and deprivations of life. Before it Old Mole bowed his head and felt a sort of envy, a regret that he, too, had not had cruel times and been a Jonah.
Clumsily he tried to tell Matilda how he felt, but she could hardly bear to talk of Enid and closed every reference to her with:
“If I had known I could have saved her. I ought to have known.”
Even worse was it when he gave her the necklace.
From the scene of the disaster they had moved to a little fishing village on the Yorkshire coast where they lodged in the cottage of a widow named Storm, perched halfway up a cliff, and from the windows they could see right over the North Sea, smooth as glass, with the herring fleet dotted like flies on its gleaming surface. Here, he thought, they could overcome their difficulties and relax the tension brought about by that last dark experience. There would be health in the wide sea and the huge cliffs and the moorland air. But it was the first time Matilda had been out of the crowd, and the peace and the emptiness induced brooding in her.
When he gave her the necklace she took it out of its white satin and velvet case and fingered it and let the light play on it. Then it seemed to frighten her, and she asked how much it had cost. He told her.
“It seems a sin,” said she, and put it back in its case.
That night she received his letter and then only she seemed to understand why he had given her the necklace, and she came and patted his shoulder and kissed the top of his head. She began to talk of Enid, how she never complained and never said anunkind word of anybody, and how proud she was of two little trinkets, a brooch and a bangle, given her by her husband, which she said she had never pawned and never would.
“The world seems upside down,” said Matilda.
“No. No,” he protested. “It is all as it should be, as it must be. My dear child, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I hurt you, made things hard for you. I was seeing the world all wrong. Men and women seemed only toys. . . .”
“But Enid used to say, you can’t expect anything from people when they have to think of money all day long.”
“When did she say that?”
“When her husband was out so long and didn’t write to her.”
“Did she love him very much?”
“Yes.”
“And I love you.”
“Yes. But. . . . It’s so different.”
He looked at her and she met his gaze. In her eyes there was a strength, a determination, a depth that were new to her. It stimulated him, braced him, and he felt that something was awakened in her, something that demanded of him, demanded, insisted. He was ashamed of his letter, ashamed that he had given her the necklace, ashamed that when she demanded of him the glory of life he had thought no higher than to give her pleasure.
So he was flung back into torment, and where before he saw humanity and its infinite variety assmaller than himself, now, with full swing to the opposite pole of exaggeration, he saw it as immeasurably larger and superior, full of a mighty purpose, ebbing and flowing like the sea, while, perched above the fringe of it, he cowered.
He concealed his distress from her. He was not so far gone but he could delight in the scents and sounds of the country, and he would tramp away over the moors or along the cliffs by himself, lie in the heather and smoke and watch the clouds, real, full-bellied clouds, lumbering and far off shedding a gray gauze of rain. He would fill his lungs with the keen air and return home hungry to sup on plain cottage fare or delicious herrings fresh from the sea.
One night, to please him, Matilda wore the necklace. It was pathetically out of place on her cheap little blouse, incongruous in their surroundings, the stiff, crowded fisherman’s parlor.
It was that decided him. There must be an end of drifting. Sink or swim, they must endeavor to take their place in the world. They would go to London. If among the third-rate mummers who had been their company for so long Matilda could so wonderfully grow and expand, what might she not, would she not, do among gentler, riper souls? And, for himself, he would seek out a task. There must be in England men of active minds and keen imaginations, men among whom he could find, if not the answers to, at least an interest in, the questions that came leaping in upon him. They would go toLondon and make a home, and Matilda should be the mistress of it. She should live her own life, and he his, and there would be an end of the strain between them, and the beginnings of the most fruitful comradeship.
Once again the immediate execution of his plans was frustrated. A strike was declared on the railways of Great Britain, and it became impossible for them to move, for they were on a branch line. Letters and newspapers were brought nine miles by road and there was no lack of food. The newspapers for a week devoted four columns to the story of the strike, then three columns, then two, then one. A little war broke out in the Persian Gulf. That dominated the strike, which lasted three weeks, and ended in the intervention of the Government, with neither the companies nor the men yielding.
The village had its Socialists, the postman and the fish buyer, and, in the beginning of it, they talked excitedly of a general strike; the dockers would come out and the carters; every port would be closed, transport at a standstill; the miners would lay down their tools, and such frightful losses would be inflicted on the capitalists that they would be unable to pursue their undertakings. They would be taken out of their hands and worked by the laborers for the laborers, and then there would be the beginnings of justice upon the earth and the laborers would begin to enjoy the good things of the world. Old Mole asked them what they meant by the goodthings of the world, and the answer was strangely Hebraic—a land flowing with milk and honey, where men labored for six days (eight hours a day) and rested the seventh day, and had time to talk and think. They set an enormous value on talking and thinking, and all their enthusiasm was for “settling questions.” The land would be “settled,” and education, and housing, and insurance, and consumption, and lead poisoning. Each “question” was separated from every other; each existed apart from everything else, and each had its nostrum, the prescription for which was deferred until the destruction of the capitalists, and the liberation of the middle classes from their own middle classishness—(for these Socialists detested the middle classes even more than the capitalists)—had placed the ingredients in their hands. The “questions” had to be settled; the capitalists had created them, the middle classes, like sheep, accepted them; the “questions” had to be settled once for all, and therefore the capitalists had to be ruined and the middle classes squeezed in their pockets and stomachs until they surrendered and accepted the new ordering of the world in justice, brotherhood, and equality. Already the strike was doing damage at the rate of hundreds and thousands a week, and they had caught the bulk of the middle classes in their holidays, and thousands of them would be unable to get back to their work.
In the thick of it Old Mole, to satisfy himself, walked over to that town which is advertised as the Queen of Watering Places. There were thousandsof the middle classes on the sands. Their children were sprawling on sand castles and dabbling in the thin washings of the sea. Fathers and mothers were lounging in deck chairs, sleeping under handkerchiefs and hats and umbrellas; grandmothers were squatting in charge of their grandchildren. Some of them were reading about the strike in the newspapers. At teatime the beach was cleared as though all human beings had been blown from it by a sea breeze. An hour later it was thickly thronged and the pierrots in their little open-air theater were playing to an enormous audience. The strike had prolonged their holiday; they were prepared to go on in its monotony instead of in the monotony of their work and domestic life. They were quite contented, dully acceptant. There were no trains? Very well, then; they would wait until there were trains. Respectable, well-behaved, orderly, genteel people do not starve. . . . And they were right.
However, it set Old Mole thinking about his own means, the independence which he owed to no virtue nor talent, nor thrift of his own, but to a system which he did not understand, to sources which in the intricacies of their journey to himself were impossible to follow. Of the many enterprises all over the world, in the profits of which he had his share, he knew nothing at all. The reports that were sent to him were too boring or too technical to read. The postman and the fish buyer assured him that he was living upon the underpaid and overtaxed labors of thousands of unhappy men and women. He hadno reason for disbelieving them, but, on the whole, his sympathies were with the middle-classes, his attitude theirs; that respectable, well-behaved, orderly, genteel people do not starve. Not that he classed himself with them; he disliked the memory of his colleagues at Thrigsby, of the men at the golf club at Bigley more than anything, and at this time he was not moderate in his dislikes. He warmed to the enthusiasm of the Socialists, but was exasperated by the manner in which, after having made a clean sweep of everything except themselves and their kind, they could produce no constructive idea, but only a thin cerebral fluid, done up in different colored bottles as in a pharmacy. Just at the point when he found himself beginning to dream of a world of decent, kindly, human beings delivered (as far as possible) from their own folly and the tyrannies bred from it, they left humanity altogether and gloated hectically over their “questions.”
If that were Socialism, he would have none of it; he preferred money. He told them so, and found that he had uttered the most appalling blasphemy. They said that Socialism was a religion, the religion that would save the world.
Said Old Mole:
“There have been Hebraism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Christianity, the worship of Isis and Osiris, the worship of the Bull, the Cat, the Snake, the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the Phallus; there have been prophets without number and martyrs more than I can say, saints for every day in theyear and more, and none of them has saved the world. More than that, I will go so far as to say that none of them has done as much to raise the standard of living as money.”
“Damn it all,” said the fish buyer, “I’m not talking about superstitions. I’m talking about ideas.”
“Money also is an idea,” replied Old Mole, “and it is as generally misunderstood as any other.”
He was beginning to be rather excited, for he felt that he was getting the better of the argument, and would not allow himself to see that he had floundered on to the debater’s trick of shunting his opponents on to unfamiliar country. They had gone up and down one stretch of line, between two points—capitalism and labor—for so long, without looking on either side of them, that it needed only a very slight adjustment or transposition of terms to reduce them to a beating of the void. They clung to their point, and the postman at last said triumphantly:
“But money isn’t a religion; Socialism is—the religion, the only religion of the working classes of this country. They’ve had enough of the next world; they want a bit o’ this for a change.”
“So do I,” returned Old Mole, “all of it. I say that money is an idea, perhaps the only practicable idea in the world at present. It isn’t a religious idea simply because men as a whole are not religious. It has the advantage over your Socialism that it is a part of life as it is, while your religion,as you call it, is only a straining after the future life, an edifice without a foundation, for to bring about its realization you have to hew and cut and shape human nature to fit into the conditions of your fantasy. If I wanted to be a prophet, which I don’t—I should base my vision on money. There would be some chance then of everybody understanding it and really taking it into his life. If you could make money a religious idea—that is, make money a thing which men would respect and revere and abuse as little as possible—you would very likely produce something—deeds, not words and questions.”
“Don’t you call the strike ‘doing something’?” cried the fish buyer.
“We shall see,” replied Old Mole.
The postman filled his cutty and laughed:
“Don’t you see,” he said to the fish buyer, “that he is pulling your leg?”
So, convinced of their superiority, they abandoned the discussion.
His tussles with these Jeremiahs of the Yorkshire village gave Old Mole the confidence he needed, and the exultant glow of a sharpening of the wits, which are like razors, most apt to cut the wielder of them when they are most dull. He tortured himself no more with his failure to satisfy Matilda, but laid all his hopes in the future and the amusing life in London that he wished to create for her. Intensely he desired her to develop her own life, to grow into the splendid creature he now saw struggling beneath the crust of ignorance and prejudice and shyness andimmaturity that hemmed her in. There was such beauty in her, and he had failed to make it his, a part of himself, and in his blundering efforts to teach her, to lead her on to the realization and gift of herself, he had wounded her even when he most adored her. . . . The dead woman, Enid, had been more to her than he had ever been. He saw that now. She had known in that woman’s lift something that was not in her own, and she desired it; how much it was painful to see. She never looked for it in him, but gazed in upon herself in a sort of pregnancy of the soul. And, like a pregnant woman, she must be satisfied in her whimsies, she must have her desires anticipated, she must be given the color and brightness of life, now before her sensitiveness had passed away for want of fair impressions. These she had been denied in the young years of her life. She must have them. . . . She must have them. . . .
She accepted his proposal to go to London without enthusiasm. She thought over it for some time and at last she said:
“Yes. It will be best for you. I don’t want you to go away again.”
And the night before they left, when the train-service was restored, she took out the necklace as she was undressing and tried it on, and looked at herself in the mirror and said:
“I’d like to wear this in London. But I shall want an evening dress, sha’n’t I?”
She smiled at him. His heart overflowed and colored the workings of his mind with a full humor. He thought:
“If there be ideas, how better can they be expressed than in terms of Matilda?”
Whoever has an ambition to be heard in a crowd must press, and squeeze, and thrust, and climb, with indefatigable pains, till he has exalted himself to a certain degree of altitude above them.
A TALE OF A TUB
VIN THE SWIM
THEY stayed at first in one of the hotels designed to give provincials bed and breakfast for five shillings, for visitors to London do not mind in how much they are mulcted in pursuit of pleasure, but resent the payment of an extra farthing for necessaries. They were high up on the fifth floor and could see right over many roofs and chimneys to the dome of St. Paul’s. They saw the sights and lunched and dined in restaurants, and went by river to Greenwich, by tram to Kew, and Old Mole was forced to admit that it is possible to fall short of a philosophic conception of happiness and yet to have a very amusing time. It was Matilda’s ambition to go to every theater in London. She found it possible to enjoy everything, and therefore he was not bored.
Sheer physical exhaustion brought their pleasure-seeking to an end, and they set about finding a habitation. On their arrival Old Mole had written to his brother, but had had no reply. At last a scrubby clerk arrived with a note:
“So glad you have come to your senses. Come to lunch, 1.15.—R. B.”
“So glad you have come to your senses. Come to lunch, 1.15.—R. B.”
They went to lunch in Gray’s Inn, and after so much frequenting of public places it was deliciously peaceful to sink into private armchairs among personal belongings and a goodly company of books. Robert was very genial and kissed Matilda and delivered her over to his laundress for the inevitable feminine preparations for a meal. While she was away he told Old Mole that he had taken silk, and was retiring from the Bar, and building himself a house at Sunningdale, for the links, and was looking out for a suitable tenant. If Old Mole liked to keep a room for him he could have the place practically as it stood, on a two-thirds sharing basis. . . . It were hard to find, in London, a pleasanter place. The windows looked out onto the rookery, the rooms were of beautiful design and proportion, and there were eight of them altogether distributed over two floors, communicating by a charming oak-balustraded staircase.
“I’ve lived here for thirty years,” said Robert, “and I’d like it kept in the family.”
Old Mole was delighted. It saved all the vexation and discomfort of finding and furnishing a house, and here, ready-made, was the atmosphere of culture and comfort he was seeking and inwardly designing for the blossoming of Matilda.
Robert beamed on her when she came in, and said:
“We’ve made a plan.”
She was properly excited.
“Yes. You’re going to live here.”
“Here? . . . Oh!” And she looked about among the pictures and the old furniture and the rich curtains and hangings, and timidly, shyly, as though she were not certain how they would take it, adopted them.
They made her sit at the head of the table and placed themselves on either side of her, and, as Robert poured her out a glass of wine (Berncastler Doktor), he said:
“You know, the old place has always wanted this.”
“Wanted—what?” asked Matilda. “I think it’s perfect.”
“A charming hostess,” said Robert, with an elaborate little bow of courtliness.
A fortnight later saw Robert installed at Sunningdale and the Beenhams in occupation of his chambers. They shared only the dining-room; Old Mole had the upstairs rooms and Matilda those downstairs. It was his arrangement, and came from reaction against the closeness in which they had lived during the long pilgrimage from lodging to lodging.
Once a fortnight Robert engaged Old Mole to play golf with him, and he consented because he desired to give Matilda as full a liberty as she could desire. In the alternate weeks Robert came to stay for two nights and occupied his room next to Old Mole’s. He would take them out to dinner and the theater, and after it the brothers would sit up yarning until the small hours, and always the discussion would begin by Robert saying:
“ ’Pon my honor, women are extraordinary!” And then, completely to his own satisfaction, he would produce those generalizations which, in England, pass for a knowledge of human nature, and Old Mole would recognize them as old companions of his own. They were too absurd for anger, but Robert’s persistence would annoy him, and he would say:
“When you live with a woman you are continually astonished to find that she is a human being.”
“Human,” answered Robert, sweetening the sentiment with a sip of port, “with something of the angel.”
“Angel be damned,” came in explosive protest, “women are just as human as ourselves, and rather more so.”
“Ah!” said Robert, with blissful inconsequence, “but it doesn’t do to let ’em know it.”
Robert’s contemptuous sentimentalization of women so bothered Old Mole that he sought to probe for its sources. Among the books in the chambers were many modern English novels, and he found nearly all of them, in varying formulæ, dealing axiomatically with woman as an extraneous animal unaccountably attached to the species, a creature fearfully and wonderfully ignorant of the affairs of the world, of her own physical processes, of the most elementary rules of health, morality, and social existence, capricious, soulless, unscrupulous, scheming, intriguing, concerned wholly and solely with marriage, if she were a “good” woman, withthe destruction of marriage if she were “bad”; at best being a sort of fairy—(Robert’s “angel”)—whose function and destiny were to pop the sugarplum of love into the mouths of virtuous men. The most extreme variant of this conception was to be found in the works of Robert Wherry, who, in a syrupy medium, depicted women as virginal mothers controlling and comforting a world of conceited, helpless little boys. Wherry was enormously successful, and he had many imitators, but none of them had his supreme audacity or his canny belief in the falsehood which was his only stock in trade. The trait of Wherry was upon all the novels in Robert’s collection. Even among the “advanced” novels the marks of the beast were there. They advanced not by considering life, but by protest against Wherry. They said, in effect, “Woman is not a mother, she is a huntress of men, or a social worker, or a mistress—(the conscious audacity in using that word!)—or a parasite, or a tyrant”; and one bold fellow said, “She has breasts”; he said it not once, but on every fifth page in every book. Old Mole found him even more disgusting than Wherry, who at least, in his dexterity, might be supposed to give pleasure to young girls and foolish, inexperienced persons of middle age—(like Robert)—and no great harm be done.
To protect himself against the uncleanness of these books he took down “Rabelais,” which Robert kept tucked away on his highest shelf. And when he had driven off the torpor in his blood andthoughts induced by the slavishness of Robert’s modern literature, he told himself that it was folly to take it seriously:
“There have always been bad books,” he said. “The good survive in the love of good readers. Good taste is always the same, but vicious taste is blown away by the cleansing winds of the soul.”
All the same, he could not so easily away with modern literature, for he was suffering from the itch to write, and had already half-planned, being, like every one else, subject to the moral disease of the time, an essay on Woman. Wherry and the rest brought him up sharp: they made him very angry, but they made him perceive in himself many of the distressing symptoms he had found in them. He gave more thought to them, and, though he knew nothing of how these books were written, or of the conditions under which literature was at that time produced and marketed, he came to see these men and women as mountebanks in a fair, each shouting outside a little tent. “Come inside and see what Woman is like.” And some showed bundles of clothes, with nobody inside them; and some showed life-size dolls; and some showed women nude to the waist; and some showed women with bared legs; and some showed women in pink fleshings; and some showed naked women who had lost their modesty, and therefore could not be gazed upon without offence.
He pondered his own essay, and recognized that its subject was not Woman, but Matilda. In thatgallery he could not show her, nor could he, without shame, display her to the public view. And therein, it seemed to him, he had touched the secret of all these lewd exhibitions. The displayers of them, in their impatient haste to catch the pennies of the public, or admiration, or whatever they might be desiring, were presenting, raw, confused and unimagined, their own unfelt and uncogitated experience, or, sometimes, an extension of their experience, in which, by an appalling logic, while they limned life as they would like to live it, they were led to the limits of unreason and egoistic folly. In presentation or extension, only those shows had any compelling force in which egoism was complete and entire lack of feeling relieved the showmen of fine scruples or human decency. Where shreds of decency were left they only served to show up the horrible obscenity of the rest.
Looking at it in this light—and there seemed no other way of correlating this literature with human life—Old Mole was distressed.
“It is bad enough,” he thought, “when they make a public show of their emotions, but when they parade emotions they never had, that is the abomination of desolation.”
Matilda read some of them. She gulped them down at the rate of two in an evening, but when he tried to discuss them with her she had nothing to say about them. To her they were just stories, to be read and forgotten. He tried to persuade himself that she was right, at any rate more sensiblethan himself, but could get no further than the admission of the fact that she had no feeling for literature and would just as soon read a cash-made piece of hackwork as a masterpiece. That led him back to the subject of his essay and woman’s indifference to ideas and idealism. He had been considering it as a general proposition, but he was forced to admit that it was in truth only Matilda’s indifference to his own ideas, and he was not at all sure but she possessed something much more valuable, a power to assimilate ideas when they had taken flesh and become a part of the life that is lived. He knew that he was using her as a test, a touchstone, and through her he had learned to tolerate many things which his reason scouted. As a practical criterion for life and living (two very different things, as he was beginning dimly to perceive)—she was very valuable to him, but it was when he passed on to the things of art and found himself faced with the need of getting or begetting clear conceptions of phenomena, in his search for the underlying, connecting and resolving truth, that she failed him. She said he thought too much. Perhaps he did, but it was a part of his way of living, and he could not rest content with his relation with her, except he had also his idea of her. It was a relief to him, and he felt he was greatly advanced along the road by which he was traveling when he found her in the National Gallery among the five singing women of theNativityof Piero della Francesca. That discovery gave her an existence in the world of art.He told her about the picture and took her to see it.
“Good Lord!” she said. “Is that what you think I’m like?”
She had thrilled to London. She used to say she would like to go back into the provinces just to have again the pleasure of arriving at the station and coming out into the roar of the traffic and the wonderful London smell. The shops had bowled her over. Cities she had known where there was one street of elegant shops, towns where there might be one shop whose elegance lifted it high above all the rest, but here there were miles and miles of them. She discovered them for herself, and then took her husband to see the magical region of Oxford Street and Regent Street. In Bond Street they saw a necklace just like hers, and a most elegant young man went into the shop and the necklace was taken out of the window. She saw hats and coats and tailor-mades that she bought “in her mind,” as she said, for she was still scared of money, and he could not induce her to be anything but frugal. (She would walk a mile to save a penny bus fare.) . . . When they went into Gray’s Inn and Robert removed his curtains and some of his furniture, she asked if she might buy some of her things herself, and they visited the great stores. She quickly lost her awe of them, and when she had drawn two or three checks for amounts staggering to her who had lived all her life cooped in by a weekly financial crisis, sheapplied her mind to the problem, and did many little sums on scraps of paper to reassure herself that she had not shaken the bank’s faith in her stability and honesty. It ceased to be a miracle to her, but she hated drawing checks to herself, for cash vanished so easily and unaccountably, while for checks made payable to tradespeople she always had something to show. In this state of mind she decided, and, as something momentous, announced her decision to buy an evening dress. It was no light undertaking. A week passed before she found the material, and when she had bought it—(for in her world you always had dresses “made up”)—she was doubtful of her taste, and as dubious of Old Mole’s. She bought theEraand looked up the address of the second girl in the pantomime, who remained to her the smartest woman of her acquaintance. Curiosity as to the address in Gray’s Inn brought the “second girl” flying to her aid; she was delighted to be of use and undertook to show Matilda the ins and outs of the shops and “the dear old West End.” She gave counsel as to trimming, knew of an admirable dressmaker near Hanover Square, “ever so cheap.” The dressmaker also sold hats, and Matilda bought hats for herself and her friend. The dressmaker also sold opera cloaks, and Matilda bought an opera cloak. The dress and the cloak necessitated, enforced, finer stockings, shoes, gloves than any Matilda possessed, and these also she purchased. . . . When all these acquisitions came home she laid them out on her bed and gazed at them in alarm andpleasure. It was the middle of the afternoon, but she changed every stitch of her clothing and donned everything new, the dress and the opera cloak, the necklace, and, as she had seen the ladies do in the theater, she wore a ribbon through her hair. In this guise Old Mole surprised her. He was ravished by her loveliness, but was so taken aback by all these secret doings, so tickled by her simplicity, that he laughed. He laughed indulgently, but he sapped her confidence, reduced all her pleasure to ashes, and there were tears, and she wished she had never come to London, and she knew she was not good enough for him, but he need not so plainly tell her so nor scorn her when she tried to make herself so: other women had pretty clothes, women, too, who were hard put to it to make a living.
He soothed her and said if she would wear her silks and fine array he would take her out next time Robert came.
“I don’t want to go out with Robert.”
“Why not?”
“If I’m not good enough to know your sister, I’m not good enough to know your brother.”
“That isn’t reasonable.”
She was ruffled and hot, and in her heart annoyed with him for coming in on her like that, for she had planned to take him by surprise on their first evening’s pleasuring. She did not want to be soothed, and preferred sparring.
“Your sister’s in town, isn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Have you seen her?”
“No.”
“You have.”
“I have not.”
He knew why she was sparring; he knew that to disappoint a woman in the vanity of her clothes is more immediately dangerous than to treat her with deliberate insult or cruelty, but he was exacerbated by her unfair onslaught on Robert, and he was sore at the attitude taken toward him by his family. Robert had done his best, but the rest were implacable; they would not admit his right to his own actions independent of their opinion. Not content with holding their opinion, they communicated it to him in the most injurious letters, written at intervals most nicely calculated for his annoyance. To a philosopher in search of tolerance and an open mind all this had been ruffling.
The quarrel blew over. Matilda dried away her tears, and he begged her pardon and promised to give her another evening dress finer even than that, made at a real, smart, fashionable, expensive dressmaker’s. . . . Shyly and diffidently they entered a famous house in Albemarle Street and were told that without an introduction the firm could not make for madam. A splendid cocotte in glorious raiment swept by them and out into the street. She had a little spaniel in her arms and a silver-gray motorcar was awaiting her. Into this she mounted and was whirled away. With something of both contempt and envy the stately young woman who had receivedthem gazed after this vision of wealth and insolence. Old Mole and Matilda felt very small and crept away.
Old Mole said:
“The wealth of London is amazing. A man would need at least ten thousand a year to amuse himself with a woman like that.”
Matilda said:
“A creature like that!”
And a little later she said:
“I think I’ll wait for my dress.”
However, she had not to wait, for Old Mole gave the story to Robert, who, with a nice sense of the fitness of things, told his sister that he wished to buy a dress for a friend of his, and, armed with her introduction, he and Matilda went and ordered a gown at an establishment even more exclusive than that in Albemarle Street. This establishment was so select that only the most indubitably married or otherwise guaranteed ladies were served; one there obtained the French style without the suspicion of French Frenchness.
The quarrel blew over, but the sensibilities of both were rasped, and they were cautious and wary with one another, which is perhaps the greatest trial of the blessed state of matrimony. He labored to be just to her, to endeavor to understand her. She was, he confessed, in a difficult position, lifted above her kind—though it was inconceivable that she could ever have met the fate or assumed the condition of her sister, Mrs. Boothroyd—and not adopted intohis. He was self-outlawed, driven out of the common mind of his class, and, so far as he could see, of his country, into his own, and therein he had as yet discovered no habitation, not even a site whereon to build. She could not share his adventures and sorrows, and, except himself and Robert, had no companionship. He asked her if she had no acquaintance in London, and she confessed to the “second girl,” Milly Dufresne. He proposed that she should ask Miss Dufresne to dinner to provide the occasion for the wearing of her new gown. She said she did not suppose he would care for Miss Dufresne, but he protested that her friends were of course his and he was only too delighted that she had a companion of her own sex and age.
The day was fixed (her birthday), the dinner ordered and arranged, a man hired for the evening to do the waiting. Without a word being said, it was assumed that there should be the ceremony due to the necklace and the French (style) gown.
As he considered all these preparations, Old Mole thought amusedly that they were not at all for Miss Dufresne and Robert (who had been invited), but rather a homage paid to their possessions, and, searching within himself for the causes of the comfort and satisfaction he felt, he found that this dinner was the first action which had brought them into harmony with the London atmosphere. Ethically there was nothing to be said for such a pretence at hospitality; but as submission to the æsthetic pressure of their surroundings, as expedience, it wasquite wonderfully right. It was the thin end of the wedge, the first turn of the gimlet in the boring of the bunghole of the fat barrel of London existence; and, if it were their fate to become Londoners, they were setting about it with sufficient adroitness. He was only afraid that Miss Dufresne would lead him back into the atmosphere of the theater from which he was so relieved to have escaped. The theater that he had known was only an excrescence on English life, a whelk or a wen on its reputable bald head. He had perched on it like a fly, but his concern, his absorbing concern, was to get at the brains inside that head and the thoughts inside the brain.
On the morning of the day fixed for the dinner Robert wired that he could not come, and Old Mole was left with the awful prospect of tackling Miss Dufresne alone. His recollection of her was of a most admirably typical minx with an appetite for admiration and flattery that had consumed all her other desires.
“Lord save us!” he said. “I was baffled by that type as a young man; what on earth can I do with it in my fifties?”
And in his heart he was fearful of spoiling Matilda’s pleasure. This dread so oppressed him that, finding her flurried and irritable with the work of preparation, he decided to absent himself, to lunch at Robert’s club, of which he had just been elected a member, and to soothe himself with a walk through Whitehall and the parks in the afternoon.
As he walked—it was a fine spring day with themost beautiful changing lights and a sweet breeze—he congratulated himself on the wisdom of having come to London. Marriage might be difficult—there was no warrant, Scriptural or other, for expecting it to be easy—but at least in London there was interest. There was not the unrelieved sordidness of other English cities. There was a tradition, some attempt to maintain it, graciousness, a kind of dignity—it might be the dignity of a roast sirloin of beef, but dignity it certainly was—here and there traces of manners, and leisure not altogether swamped by luxury. Coming from Thrigsby was like leaving the racket of the factory for the elegant shop in which the finished articles were sold. He liked that simile, and there he left his speculations concerning London. He was not at his ease in this kind of thinking; a thought was only valuable to him when it was successfully married to an emotion to produce an image. For London he could find no image, and when he thought of England he was taken back to his most vivid emotion, that when in the caravan with Copas they had breasted the hill and come in view of the Pennine Range: but this was a mere emotion mated with no thought. As for the Empire, it simply had no significance. It was a misnomer, or rather, a name given to an illusion, or, at best, a generalization. It was certainly not an entity, but only the impossible probability of a universally accepted fiction. He could not accept it, nor could he accept the loose terminology of the politicians. For this reason he could never now readthe newspapers except for the cricket and football news in which his interest was maintained by habit.
Less and less was he interested in things and ideas that were not immediately human, and therefore fluid and varying in form and color as clouds and trees in the wind and birds in the air—and human beings on the earth. Rigid theory and fixed conceptions actually hurt him; they were detached, dead, like windfall fruit rotting on the ground, and everywhere, in books, in the newspapers, in public speeches, he saw them gathered up and stored, because it was too much trouble to take the ripe fruit from the tree, or to wait for the hanging fruit to ripen, or because (he thought) men walk with their eyes to the ground, even as he had done, and see nothing of the beauty above and around them. And, thinking so, he would feel an impulse to arise and shout and waken men, but then, regretfully, he would admit that he was too old to surrender to this impulse, and would think too much before he spoke, and would end by prating like Gladstone or roaring like Tom Paine.
It seemed to him that the character of London was changed or changing. He delighted especially in the young men and women, who walked with a new swagger, almost with freedom, and adorned themselves with gay, bold colors. The young women especially were limber in their movements, marvelously adroit in dodging their hampering garments. Their bodies were freer. They had not the tight, trussed appearance of the young women of his ownday and generation. He delighted especially in the young women of London. They gave him hopefulness.
He was pleased to see that the young men delighted in them, also. They walked with their arms in the arms of the young women in a fine, warm comradeship, whereas, in his day, and not so long ago neither, the girls had placed a timid little hand in the arms of their swains and been towed along in a sort of condescension. It pleased him to see the young men frankly, and in spite of themselves and their dignity and breeding, give the proper involuntary salute to passing youth and beauty. . . . As he sat in St. James’s Park a deliciously pretty girl passed by him, and she repeated nothing of the full homage he paid her, but then came a tall young man, sober and stiff, in silk hat and tail coat. They passed, the young man and the young woman: a lifting of the shoulders in the young man, a tilt of the head in the young woman, a half-smile of pleasure, and they went their ways. The young man approached Old Mole. He gave a little start and up went his hand in the old school salute. Old Mole rose to his feet.
“My dear fellow. . . .”
It was A. Z. Panoukian.
He said:
“Well, sir——”
They sat down together. Panoukian bore the old expression which had always overcast his face when there were discoverable laches in his conduct, andOld Mole felt himself groping for the mood of jocular severity with which he had been wont to meet that expression.
“Well, sir, I never thought——”
Old Mole found the formula:
“Panoukian, what have you been up to?”
“Well, sir, I’m jolly glad to have met you, because I didn’t know what you might have heard.”
“Pray, Panoukian, forget that I was ever your schoolmaster. I am no longer an academic person, though there are distressing traces of my old profession in my outlook.”
Panoukian had heard the story, and a grin spread across his face. That made things easier. He plumped out a full confession and personal history.
He had been a rank failure at Oxford. He had no one but himself to blame, of course. Perhaps he had not given the place a fair trial, but at the end of his fourth term he had decided that it was no use going on, and removed himself. It was partly, he thought, that he could not endure Tibster, and partly that he had lost all power of concentrating on his work.
“I don’t know,” he said, “but at school there was always something to work for, to get to Oxford. When I got there I seemed to shoot ahead of it, to see beyond it, and in the place itself I could find nothing but Tibster and the Tibsterian mind, cut off from the world outside and annoyed because that world has a voluptuousness which is not in its own little box. I think I changed physically, grew a newkidney or another lobe of the brain. Anyhow, the world shrank and I became very large and unwieldy, and there was nothing positive in my existence except my dislike of Tibster.”
“Did you smoke a great deal?” asked Old Mole.
“Only after the crisis.”
“Did you make a verse translation of the Odyssey?”
“Only the first four books.”
“I imagine, if you had taken your symptoms to Tibster, he would have put you right. The university has that effect on sensitive undergraduates, especially on non-Public School men. A sudden growth, a swift shooting from boyhood into the beginnings of manhood. It is very touching to watch; but Tibster must have seen it happen so often that it would be difficult for him to notice that it was happening to you more violently than usual.”
“I never thought of it from Tibster’s point of view.”
“My dear Panoukian, I am only just beginning to see your affairs from your point of view, or, indeed, to admit that you have a point of view at all. . . . I hope it was not a great disappointment to your father.”
Panoukian said his father had died during his second term. He had been attached to his father and was with him at the end, and perhaps that was what began the crisis. The business had gone to his brothers, but he was left enough to live on, and that was how he came to be in London. For the timebeing he was acting as secretary, unpaid, to Tyler Harbottle, M. P. for North Thrigsby and an old friend of his father’s. Old Mole remembered Harbottle, a butter merchant in Thrigsby and president of the Literary Society, the Field Society, the Linnæan Society, the Darwin Club, the Old Fogies, and the Ancient Codgers, and formerly a member of the Art Gallery Committee, and, in that capacity, provocative of the outcry on the purchase of a picture by so advanced and startling a painter as Puvis de Chavannes. He asked Panoukian how he liked the House of Commons, and Panoukian said it was full of Tibsters with soap and chemicals and money on their brains instead of Greek and Latin and book philosophy.
“Harbottle is a Tibster, with a little nibbling mind, picking here and there, not because he is hungry, but because he is afraid some one else will get the pieces if he doesn’t. I went to him because I wanted to work; but it isn’t work, it’s just getting in other people’s way. And there are swarms of Harbottles in the House. I sometimes think that the whole of politics is nothing but Harbottling. It would be all very well to have the brake hard on if the country were going to Hell, but when it is a matter of a long, stiff hill it is heartrending.”
And with a magnificent gesture he swept all the Tibsters and Harbottles away. Old Mole found his enthusiastic, sweeping condemnation very refreshing. There was youth in it, and he was beginning to value youth above all things. Above wisdom andexperience? At least above the caution of inexperience.
Clearly Panoukian was prepared to go on talking, to leave Harbottle to go on nibbling without his aid, but Old Mole had begun to feel a chill, and rose to go. Panoukian was also going toward the India Office—Harbottle was corresponding with the Secretary about two Parsees who had been refused their right of appeal to the Privy Council—and so far they went together. As they parted Old Mole remembered Matilda’s dinner party and Miss Dufresne. Panoukian seemed an excellent buffer. He invited him, and from the eagerness with which the invitation was accepted he surmised that Panoukian was rather lonely in London. Then he felt glad that he had asked him.
The party was very successful. Matilda was delighted to have another male, and that a young one, to admire her fine feathers, and Panoukian was obviously flattered and deliciously alarmed to meet a real live actress who confirmed him in his superstitious notions of the morals of the stage by flirting with him at sight. He was not very skilful in his response, but a very little subjugation was enough to satisfy Miss Dufresne: she only needed to know that she could an she would. He was very shy, and, with him, shyness ran to talkativeness. With Matilda he was like a schoolboy; his attitude toward her was a softening and rounding with chivalry of his attitude toward Old Mole. He hardly everspoke to her without calling her Mrs. Beenham: “Yes, Mrs. Beenham”—“Don’t you think so, Mrs. Beenham?”—“As I was saying to your husband, Mrs. Beenham. . . .” When he left he summoned up courage to ask Old Mole if he would bring Mrs. Beenham to tea with him. He lived in the Temple and had a wonderful view of St. Paul’s and the river. Old Mole promised he would do so, and asked him to come in whenever he liked.
“It’s awfully good of you,” said Panoukian, and with that he went off with Miss Dufresne, who had engaged him to see her into a taxi. Matilda stood at the head of the stairs and watched them go down.
“Good night, dearie,” called Miss Dufresne, and Panoukian, looking up, saw Matilda bending over.
“Good night, Mrs. Beenham,” he cried.
Matilda, returning to the study, said:
“What a nice voice that boy has got.”
“I used to expect great things of Panoukian,” said Old Mole, “but then neither he nor I had seen beyond Oxford.”
“Is he very clever?”
“He used to have the sort of cleverness schoolmasters like. It remains to be seen whether he has the sort of cleverness the world needs. He is very young.”
“Not soveryyoung.”
“Like your party?”
“Oh, yes.”
“You looked very pretty.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Good girl. What about bed?”
But she was loth to move. She began several topics, but soon dropped them. At last she plunged:
“Millie’s going into a new piece. It’s a real play this time. It’s about the stage and there are to be a lot of chorus girls in it. She says she could get me in easily.”
Old Mole took this in silence.
“I won’t go if you don’t like it,” she said.
“Have you said you would go?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Do you want to?”
“What else is there for me to do?”
Indeed, what was there? He was saddened and angry at the use of the argument. He had wanted her to feel free, to come and to go, so long only as she treated him with frankness, and here he had so far failed that she had made arrangements to return to the theater and then asked for hispost factoconsent. What was it that kept her in awe of him? Not his thoughts of her, nor his feeling for her, so far as he knew either. . . . He kissed her good night and sat sadly brooding over it all: but it was too difficult for him, and he was tired and his humor would not come to his aid. He sought refuge in books, but they yielded him none, and at last Panoukian’s phrase recurred to him:
“Perhaps,” he said, “perhaps I am a Harbottler in marriage, nibbling at love. God help me if I am.”
He thought surely he had reached the worst. But Fate is inexhaustibly ingenious. He was to have his bellyful of Harbottling.
Among his letters on the morning after the party he found one, the envelope of which bore in print the name of Langley Brown, Literary and Dramatic Agent, 9 Coventry Street, W. This letter informed him that Mr. Henry Butcher, of the Pall Mall Theater, proposed to immediately produce—(the split infinitive is Mr. Langley Brown’s)—a play called “Lossie Loses,” by Carlton Timmis, the rights of which Mr. Brown believe to be in Mr. Beenham’s hands. And would Mr. Beenham call on Mr. Brown, or, if not, write to give his consent, when the contract would be drawn up and the play produced.
He had almost forgotten Carlton Timmis. The letter had been forwarded through his banker. He stared at it, turned it over and over, read it again. It seemed to be an authentic document. He handed it to Matilda. She said with awe:
“Mr. Butcher!”
And, with unconscious imitation of the humor of the English Bench, Old Mole asked:
“Who is Mr. Butcher?”
This was shocking ignorance. For twenty years and more Mr. Henry Butcher’s name had been in the newspapers, on the hoardings, and his portrait, his wife’s portrait, his baby’s portrait, his dog’s portrait,his horse’s portrait had appeared in the magazines, and his commendation of a certain brand of cigarette had for the last ten years been used by the makers as an advertisement. For all that, his name and personality had not penetrated Old Mole’s consciousness.
“Did you buy the play?” asked Matilda.
“I lent him fifty pounds, and he left it with me. I had no very clear idea as to his intention.”
“Is it a good play?”
“You shall read it.”
He unearthed it with some difficulty and gave it to her. She read it and wept over it.
“Is it a good play?” he asked.
“I don’t know, but it’s a lovely part.”
He went to see Mr. Brown, a flashy little Cockney who peppered him with illustrious literary names and talked about everything but the business in hand. Old Mole asked where Timmis might be, and Mr. Brown said he had heard from him only once, and that from a place called Crown Imperial, in British Columbia.
“A good fellow, Timmis, but cracked. Impatient, you know. I never can make young writers see that they’ve got to wait until the old birds drop off the perch before their masterpieces can come home to roost.”
“Is ‘Lossie Loses’ a masterpiece?” asked Old Mole innocently.
“Between ourselves,” replied the agent, “I don’tthink there’s much in it. But Mr. Butcher has been having a lean period lately and wanted something cheap, and thought he’d try a new author.”
He produced the contract. Old Mole read it through in a sort of dream and signed it. He was shown out with a hearty handshake, and that very evening he received from Mr. Brown a check for ninety pounds—a hundred in advance of royalties less 10 per cent. commission. He was disconcerted. There was some uncanny wizardry in it that, by merely walking into an office and signing a paper, one could at the end of the day be the richer by ninety pounds with never a stroke of work done for it. His first impulse was to give the check to Matilda, but, on reflection, he decided to give her forty and to keep the fifty for Timmis if he could be found. He looked up Crown Imperial, British Columbia, on the map and in the gazetteer, but there was no mention of it, and, concluding that it must be a new place, he wrote to Timmis there in the hope of catching him. When he had posted his letter he remembered that Timmis might have dropped his stage name, and wrote another letter to Cuthbert Jones. Then he brushed the play from his mind.
Within a fortnight it was impossible to walk along any of the main thoroughfares of London without seeing the words “Lossie Loses,” with the name of Mr. Henry Butcher in enormous letters, and the name of Carlton Timmis in very small print.
For the first night Old Mole received, with Mr. Butcher’s compliments, a ticket for Box B. Panoukian and Robert came to dinner. Matilda wore her first evening dress and the opera cloak, a red ribbon in her hair, and graced the front of the box with the three men behind her.
There is a certain manner appropriate to a seat in the front of a box—a consciousness that is not quite self-consciousness, a certain setting back of the shoulders, a lifting of the head, a sort of shy brazenness, an acceptance of being part of the show, and, for all the pit knows, a duchess. Matilda had caught it to perfection and turned a dignified profile to the opera glasses directed upon her. Panoukian pointed out the political personages in the stalls, and, being a great reader of those glossy photographic papers, which are perhaps the most typical product of the time, was able to recognize many of the literary and artistic celebrities of the moment. Actresses glided fussily to their seats, smiling acknowledgment to the applause of the groundlings. There was a bobbing up and down, a bowing and a smiling, a waving of programs and fans from acquaintance to acquaintance, a chatter and hum of many voices that drowned the jigging overture, and went droning on into the first few moments of the play.
Old Mole’s memory of it was hazy, but sufficiently alive to quarrel with some of the impressions he now had of it and to enable him to distinguish between the work of the actors and the work of the author. The play was worse and better than hehad thought. In his recollection it was not so entirely unscrupulous in its appeal to the surface emotions, nor so extraordinarily adroit in sliding off into a dry, sly and perfectly irrelevant humor just at the moment when those base appeals looked as though they were going to be pushed so far as to offend even the thickest sensibilities. Each curtain was brought down with a neat, wistful little joke, except at the end of the third act, when, in silence, Lossie, the little unloved heroine of the play, prepared to cook the supper for the husband who had just left her. In the fourth act he came back and ate it, so that all ended happily. The atmosphere was Lancashire, and the actors spoke Scots, Irish, Belfast, Somerset, and Wigan, but that did not seem to matter. The actress who played Lossie spoke with a very good Thrigsby accent, and her performance was full of charm. She had a fine voice and knew how to use it, and her awkwardness of gesture suited the uncouthness with which the Lancashire folk were endowed. She and the sad little jokes carried all before them, and there was tremendous applause at the end of each act and the close of the play.
Mr. Henry Butcher made a grateful little speech, and, looking toward Old Mole’s box, said the author was not in the house. All eyes were turned toward the box, and the shouting was renewed.
Entirely unconscious of the attention and interest they were arousing, the party escaped. Robert was hungry and insisted on having oysters. As they atethem they discussed the play. Robert and Matilda were enthusiastic, Old Mole was dubious and depressed, and Panoukian contemptuous.
“I’ve seen worse,” he said, “but nothing with quite so much effrontery. It was like having your face dabbed with a baby’s powder puff. I felt all the time that in a moment they would have a child saying its prayers on the stage. But they never did, and there was extraordinary pleasure in the continual dread of it, and the continual sense of relief. And every now and then they made one laugh. I believe it will succeed.”
It succeeded. The critics unanimously agreed that the new play had charm, and, said one of them: “It is with plays, as with women; if they have charm, you need look no further. All London will be at Lossie’s feet.”
At the end of the first week Old Mole received a check for one hundred and ten pounds; at the end of the second a check for one hundred and twenty-five. He sent two cablegrams to Carlton Timmis and Cuthbert Jones at Crown Imperial, British Columbia. No answer. Timmis (or Jones) had disappeared.
Money poured in.
The play was bought by cable for America, and five hundred pounds passed into Old Mole’s account. It became almost a horror to him to open his letters lest they should contain a check.
Worst of all, the newspapers scented “copy.” Asuccessful play, a vanished author, no one to claim the fame and fortune lying there. One paper undertook to find Carlton Timmis. It published photographs of him, scraps of biography and anecdotes, but Timmis remained hidden, and the newspapers yelled, in effect, “Where is Timmis? The public wants Timmis. Wireless has tracked a murderer to his doom, surely it cannot fail to reveal the whereabouts of the public’s new darling?” Another journal found its way to the heart (i.e.,the box office) of the theater and asked in headlines, “Is Butcher Paying Royalties?” Butcher wrote to say that he was paying royalties to the owner of the play, whose name was not Carlton Timmis. And at last a third newspaper announced the name of the beneficiary of the play—H. J. Beenham. Gray’s Inn was besieged. Old Mole was in despair and declared that they would have to pack up and go away until the uproar had died down, but, more sensibly, Matilda invited a journalist in, gave him a drink, and told him the little there was to tell. The next check was for a hundred and eighty pounds.