Rolling, rolling in the heather,All in the bonny August weather,There was me and Leezy Lochy in the dingle,There was Jock and Maggie Kay in the dell,For ilka lassie has her laddie,And ilka laddie has his lassie,And what they dae together I’ll na tell,But Leezy, Leezy Lochy in the dingle,Is bonny as the moon above the heather.Matilda sang the song all through and made Old Mole and Panoukian troll the chorus. There were a freshness and warmth about her that were almost startling, full of mischief and sparkling fun. Sheteased both the men and mysteriously promised them a great reward if they could guess a riddle.“My second is in woman but not in man, my first is French, I have two syllables, and you’ll never guess.”“Where did you get it?” asked Panoukian.“I made it up.”So they tried to guess and soon confessed themselves beaten. Then she told them that the second half of the riddle wassense, because she never knew a man who had it; and the first half wasnonand together they madenonsense, because she felt like it.Her mood lasted for five days. Panoukian came in every evening—(she was rehearsing for a new play, but only in the daytime)—and they frolicked and sang and burlesqued their own solemn discussions. On the sixth day her high spirits sank and she was moody and silent. She forbade Panoukian to come in the evening. He came at teatime, and she stayed out. One day Old Mole had tea with Panoukian. They walked in the Temple Gardens afterward, and Panoukian blurted out:“I don’t know if your wife has told you, sir, but after we left the Schlegelmeiers’ it was such a glorious night, and we were so glad to be in the air again, that we took a taxi and drove down to Richmond and came back in the dawn. There wasn’t any harm in it, as you and I see things, but I’ve been thinking it over and come to the conclusion that you ought to know.”A sudden anger took possession of Old Mole, and he retorted:“Of course, if there were any harm in it, you wouldn’t tell me.”“Hang it all, sir. You haven’t any right to say that to me.”“No, no. Quite right. I haven’t. No. I beg your pardon. I’m glad to see you such friends. She isn’t very good at making friends. Acquaintances come and go, but there seem to be very few people whom she and I can share.”“I have the profoundest respect for her,” said Panoukian. “As we were coming back in the dawn she told me all her life. The things she has suffered, the misery she has come through.”And they fraternized in their sympathy for Matilda. Panoukian gave an instance of her early sufferings. She had never told it to her husband, and he returned to Gray’s Inn puzzled and uneasy, to find her sitting idle, doing nothing, with no pretence at activity. He was tender with her, and asked if she might be ill. She said no, but she had been thinking and wanted to know what was the good of anything. She said she knew she never could be like the other women they knew; it wasn’t any good, they seemed to feel that she was different and hadn’t had their education and pleasant girlhood, and they only wanted her because they thought she was a success. He told her that he wanted nothing less than for her to be like the other women, that he never wanted her to live in and be one of the crowd,but only to be herself, her own brave, delightful self.“That’s what Arthur says.” (They had begun to call PanoukianArthurduring their few days of high spirits.) “He says you’ve got to be yourself or nothing. And I don’t understand, and thinking makes it so hard. . . .” She did not want him to speak. She said, “You still love me? You still want me?”And there came back to him almost the love of their wanderings, the old desire with its sting of jealousy.For three days after that she never once spoke to him.It seemed she wrote to Panoukian, for he appeared again on her last night before the opening of the new play, and was there when she returned from the dress rehearsal. She shook hands with him, made him sit by the fireplace opposite Old Mole, took up some sewing, and said:“Now talk.”After some diffidence Panoukian began, and they came round to “Lossie Loses,” the last weeks of which had at length been announced. It would have run for two years and two months. Panoukian’s theory of its success was that people were much like children, and once they were pleased with a story wanted it told over and over again without a single variation.“The public,” said Matilda, “are very funny. When they don’t listen to you, you think them idiots;when they do, you adore them and think them wonderful.”“I have never felt anything but contempt for them for liking ‘Lossie Loses,’ ” said Old Mole.“But then,” put in Panoukian, “you did not write it. If you had, you would be persuaded by now that it is a masterpiece. That is how Harbottles are made: they attribute their flukes to their skill and insist on being given credit for them.”“I often wonder,” said Old Mole, “what the man who wrote it thinks about it. He must surely know by now.”“He must be dead.” Matilda swept him out of consideration with her needle. “I don’t believe any man would have let it go on so long and not come forward.”Panoukian examined the ethical aspect of the situation, and from that they passed to the discussion of morals, whether there was in fact any valid morality in England, or simply those things were not done which were unpleasant in their consequences. The Ten Commandments were presumably the basis of the nation’s morality, since they were read publicly in places of worship every Sunday (though the majority of the adult population never went near any place of worship). How many of the Commandments were closely observed, how many (in the general custom) met with compromise, how many neglected? Murder and the more obvious forms of theft were punished; deliberate and wicked fraud, also, but at every turn the morality had beenmodified, its bad admitted to be not always and altogether bad, its good equally subject to qualification. It had been whittled and chipped away by non-observance until practically all that was left was a bad consisting of actions which were a palpable nuisance to society, with never a good at all.“Either,” said Panoukian, “the Jewish morality has never been suitable for the Western races or they have never been intelligent enough to grasp its intention or its applicability to the facts of life and the uses of society.”“I wish you wouldn’t use so many long words,” said Matilda.But Panoukian rushed on:“I can’t believe in the justice of a morality which is based on the idea of punishment. It is inevitable that such a system should set a premium on skill in evading consequences rather than on right action.”“I believe,” said Old Mole, “in tolerance, you can’t begin to hold a moral idea without that.”“Right,” said Matilda, “is right and wrong is wrong. I always know when I’m doing right and when I’m doing wrong.”“But you do it all the same?” asked Panoukian.“Oh, yes.”“And so does every healthy human being. So much for morality.”“Don’t you believe that people are always punished?” asked Old Mole.“Certainly not. There are thousands of men who go scot free, and so sink into self-righteousness thatmore than half their faculties atrophy, and not even the most disastrous calamity, not even the most terrible spiritual affliction, can penetrate to their minds.”“That,” said Old Mole, “is the most horrible of punishments and seems to me to show that there is a moral principle in the universe. I find it difficult to understand why moralists are not content to leave it at that, but I have observed that men apply one morality to the actions of others and another to their own. The wicked often prosper, and the righteous are filled with envy and pass judgment, wherein they cease to be righteous.”“My father,” said Matilda, “was a very bad man, but I was fond of him. My mother was a good woman, and I never could abide her.”“It is all a matter of affection,” quoth Panoukian with more than his usual emphasis.“I agree,” muttered Old Mole.And all three were surprised at this conclusion. They were uneasily silent for a moment or two, when Panoukian departed. Then Matilda rose and came to her husband and held out her hand. He took it in both his and looked up at her.“Good night,” she said.“Good night.”“Until to-morrow.”And slowly the smile he loved came to her face. Warmed by it and encouraged, he said:“Is anything worrying you?”The smile disappeared.“No. Nothing. I’m beginning to think about things, and you. It’s all so queer. . . . Good night.”And she was gone.He attended the first night of the new play. Matilda had a larger part, and one very short scene of emotion, or, at least, of what passed for it in the English theater of those days, that is to say it was a nervous and sentimental excitement altogether disproportionate to the action, and not built into the structure of the play, but plastered on to it to conceal an alarming crack in the brickwork. Matilda did very well and only for a moment let the scene slip out of the atmosphere of gimcrackery into the air of life. She did this through defective technique, but that one moment of genuine feeling, even in so false a cause, was so startling as to whip the audience out of its comfortable lethargy into something that was so near pleasure that they could not but applaud. It was an artistic error, since it was her business to be as banal and shallow as the play, which had been made with great mechanical skill so that it required only the superficial service of the actors, and, unlike the candle of the Lord, made no attempt to “search out the inward parts of the belly.” In her part Matilda had to discover and betray in one moment her love for the foppish hero of the piece, and being, as aforesaid, wanting in her technical equipment, drew, for the purpose of the scene, on her own imagination, and that which—though she might not know it—had possession of it. The audience was startled into pleasure, Old Mole into something like terror. There was in the woman there on the stage a power, a quality, an essence—he could not find the word—on which he had never counted, for which he had never looked, which now, he most passionately desired to make his own. He knew that it was not artistry in her, his own response to it had too profoundly shaken him; it was living fire, flesh of her flesh, and marvelously made her, for the first time, kin and kind with him. And he knew then that he had been living on theory about her, and was so contemptuous of it and of himself that he brushed aside all thought of the past, all musings and speculations, and was all eagerness to join her, to tell her of the amazing convulsion of himself, and how, at last, through this accident, he had recognized her for what she was. . . . He could not sit through the rest of the play. Its artificiality, its inane falsehood disgusted him. He went out into the brilliantly lighted streets and walked furiously up and down, up and down, and on. And the men and women in the streets seemed small and mechanical, utterly devoid of the vital principle he had discerned in his wife’s eyes, voice, gesture, as she played her part. They were just a crowd, mincing and strutting, bound together by nothing but the capacity to move, to place one leg before another and proceed from one point to another of the earth’s surface. He had that in common with them, but nothing else: nothing that bound him tothem. (So he told himself, and so truly he thought, for he was comparing a moment of real experience with a series of impressions made on him by his surroundings.) He walked up and down the glittering streets, streaked with white and yellow and green and purple lights, and the commotion in him waxed greater. . . . When he returned to the theater Matilda was gone, and had left no message for him.He found her in her bed, with the light on, reading. She had undressed hastily and her clothes were littered about the room in an untidiness most unusual with her. She stuffed what she was reading under her pillow.“You didn’t wait for me,” he said.“No. I didn’t want to see anybody. I rushed away before the end.”“Anything wrong?”“I hate the theater. I hate it all, the people in it, the blinding lights, the painted scenery, the audience, oh! the audience! I don’t ever want to go near it again. It’s just playing and pretending. . . .”“The piece was certainly nothing but a pretence at drama.”“Oh! Don’t talk about it.”“But I want to know what has upset you.”“I can’t tell you. I don’t know myself. I only know that I’m miserable, miserable. Just let me be.”He had learned that when she was ill or out of sorts or depressed she never had any desire left inher but to curl up and hide herself away. At such times the diffidence inherent in her character seemed wholly to master her, and there was no rousing her to a better grace. He withdrew, his exaltation dampened, and repaired to his study, where in the dark at his desk in the window he sat gazing out into the night, at the few lighted windows of the Inn, and the bruise-colored glow of the sky. He could think only of her and now it seemed to him that he could really lose himself and live in her, and through her come to love. He remembered how, when she was rehearsing, he had asked how she was progressing, and she had replied: “I shall never get it. Either the part’s all wrong or I am.” And that evening she had “got it,” reached what the author had been fumbling after, the authentic note of human utterance, the involuntary expression of love. It had alarmed himself: how devastating must it then have seemed to her! It was almost horrible in its irrelevance. It came from neither of them and yet it was theirs, but not for sharing. It had driven her, like a beast on a stroke of illness, to hide away from him, but through her and only through her could he approach it. The abruptness of its outburst, its geyser-like upward thrust, made it alone seem natural and all their life of habit artificial and shabby; how much more then the stale and outworn tricks of the theater! He approached it, worshiping, marveling at the sense of release in his soul, and knew that, with the power it gave him, he had bitten through the crust of life, whereat he hadbeen nibbling and gnawing with his mind and picking with the chipped flints of philosophies. And he was awed into humility, into admission of his own impotence, into perception, clear and whole, of the immensity of its life’s purpose, of its huge force and mighty volume bearing the folly and turbulence of mind and flesh lightly on its bosom, so that a man must accept life as to be lived, can never be its master, but only its honorable servant or its miserable slave. He had then the sense of being one with life, from which nothing was severed, not the smallest bubble of a thought, not the least grain of a desire, of possessing all his force and a boundless reserve of force, and he whispered:“I love.”And the mighty sound of it filled all the chambers of his life, so that he was rich beyond dreams.He laid his head in his arms and wept. His tears washed away the stains of memory, the scars and spotted dust upon his soul, and he knew now that he had no longer to deal with an idea of life, but with life itself, and he was filled with the desperate courage of his smallness.For a brief space after a storm of summer rain the world is a place of glowing color, of flowing, harmonious lines. So it was now with Old Mole, and he discovered the charm of things. His habitual life went on undisturbed, and he could find pleasure even in that. His love for Matilda reduced him to a sort of passiveness, so that he asked nothing ofher, gave her of himself only so much as she demanded, and was content to watch her, to be with her, to feel that he was in no way impeding her progress.She showed no change save that there was a sort of effort in her self-control, as though she were deliberately maintaining her old attitude toward him. She never made any further allusion to her avowed hatred of the theater, and returned to it as though nothing had suffered. He told himself that it was perhaps only a mood of exhaustion, or that, though she might have passed through a crisis, yet it was possible for her to be unaware of it, so that its effects would only gradually become visible and very slowly translated into action. After all, she was still very young, and the young are mercifully spared having to face their crises. . . . When he went to see her play her part again she had mastered her scene by artistry; the almost barbaric splendor of her outburst was gone; she had a trick for it, and her little scene became, as it was intended to be, only a cog in the elaborate machinery by which the entertainment moved.This time Panoukian was with him, and denounced the piece as an abomination, a fraud upon the public—(who liked it immensely)—and he produced a very ingenious, subtle diagnosis of the diseases that were upon it and submitted it to a thorough and brutal vivisection, act by act, as they sat through it. Old Mole was astonished to find that Panoukian’s violence annoyed him, offended him asan injustice, and, though he did not tell him so, saw clearly that he was applying to the piece a standard which had never for one moment been in the mind of the author, whose concern had been to the best of his no great powers to contrive an amusing traffic which should please everybody and offend none, supply the leading actors with good and intrinsically flattering parts, tickle the public into paying for its long-continued presentation, and so pay the rent of the theater, the formidable salary list, and provide for the satisfaction of his pleasures, the caprices of his extremely expensive wife, and his by no means peculiar mania for appearing in the columns of the newspapers and illustrated journals; pure Harbottling; but it had nothing at all to do with what Panoukian was talking about, namely, art. It was certainly all out of drawing and its moral perspective was all awry, but it was hardly more fantastical and disproportionate than Panoukian’s criticism. It was entirely unimportant: to apply a serious standard to it was to raise it to a level in the mind to which it had no right. Of the two, the author and Panoukian, he was not sure but Panoukian was the greater fool. However, extending his indulgence from one to the other, he let the young man talk his fill, and said nothing. He had begun to treasure silence.He loved the silent evenings in Gray’s Inn, where he could sit and smoke and chuckle over the world’s absurdity, and ponder the ways of men so variously revealed to him in the last few years, and gloatover his own happiness and dream of the days when Matilda should have come to the full bloom of her nature and they would perfectly understand each other, and then life would be a full creation, as full and varied, as largely moving as the passing of the seasons. He had delightful dreams of the time when she would fully share his silence, the immense region beyond words. He was full of happiness, gummy with it, like a plum ripe for plucking—or falling.In his fullness of living—the very top, he told himself, of his age, of a man’s life—he found it easy to cover paper with his thoughts and memories, delightful and easy to mold them into form, and to amuse himself he began a work which he called “Out of Bounds,” half treatise, half satire on education, dry, humorous, mocking, in which he drew a picture of the members of his old profession engaged in hacking down the imaginations of children and feeding the barren stumps of their minds with the sawdust of the conventional curricula. He was very zestful in this employment, perfectly content that Matilda should be even less demonstrative than before, telling himself that she was wrestling with the after effects of her crisis and would turn to him and his affection when she needed them. He made rapid progress with his work.“Lossie Loses” came to an end at last, and he counted the spoils. He had gained many thousands of pounds—(the play was still running in America)—a few amusing acquaintances, a career for hiswife, and an insight into the workings of London’s work and pleasure which he would have found it hard to come by otherwise. He chuckled over it all and flung himself with fresh ardor into his work.After the hundredth performance of her play Matilda declared that she was tired, and wanted a rest, and she threw up her part. She came to him and said she wished to go away.“Very well. Where shall we go?”“I want to go alone.”And she waited as though she expected a protest from him. For a moment she gazed at him almost with pleading in her eyes, and then she governed herself, stood before him almost assertively and repeated:“Alone.”In the aggression he felt the strain in her and told himself she was wanting to get away from him, to break the habit of their life, to come back to him fresh, to advance toward him, reach up to the prize he held in his hands. He told himself that to break in upon her diffidence might only be to thicken the wall she—(he said it was she)—had raised between them. He said:“Won’t you mind?”“No. I want to be alone.”“Where will you go then?”“I don’t know. Anywhere. By the sea, I think.”He suggested the Yorkshire coast, but she said that was too far and she didn’t like the North.“Oh! No!” he said. “Want to forget it?”She passed that by.He took down a map, and she looked along the south coast and pitched on a place in Sussex, because it was far from the railway and would therefore be quiet. He left his work, wired to the hotel for rooms, sat and talked to her as she packed, saw her off the next morning and returned to his work, rejoicing in the silence and emptiness of the chambers.He sent her letters on to her without particularly noticing their superscription. On the third day a letter came for her, and he recognized the handwriting as Panoukian’s. He sent that on. When his work went swimmingly and his pen raced he wrote to her, long, droll, affectionate epistles: when his work hobbled then he did not write and hardly gave a thought to her. She wrote to him in her awkward hand with gauche, conventional descriptions of the scenery amid which she was living. He read them and they gave him fresh light on education. He was reaching the constructive part of his work, and it began to take shape as an exposition of the methods by which the essential Matilda might have been freed of the diffidence and self-distrust which hemmed her in. That brought him to feminism, and he imagined a description of women in Trafalgar Square screaming in a shrill eloquence for deliverance from the captivity into which they had been cast by the morals of the sand heap. He was keenly interested in this scene, and, as he had sketched it, was not sure that he had the topography of the Square exact.One evening, therefore, he dined at his club, meaning to walk home by the Square and the Strand. He was drawn into an argument and did not set out before ten o’clock. It was one of those nights when heavy clouds lumber low over the city and absorb the light, break the chain of it so that the great arcs are like dotted lanterns, and behind them buildings loom. He turned down Parliament Street to get the full effect of this across the Square, and then came up across and across it, carefully observing how the great thoroughfares lay in relation to the Nelson Column. As, finally, he was crossing to the Strand he was almost dashed over by a taxicab, drew back, looked up, saw his wife gazing startled out of the window. He stared at her, but she did not recognize him and seemed to be entirely absorbed in the fright and shock of the avoided accident. He followed the car with his eyes. It had turned sharply in the middle of the road to pass into the southward stream of traffic. He saw it slow down and draw up outside a huge hotel, and hurried after it. The porter came out and opened the door. Matilda stepped to the pavement, and after her Panoukian. They passed in through the revolving door of the hotel just as he reached the pavement. The porter staggered in with Matilda’s portmanteau.Old Mole lunged forward on an impulse. He reached the door and glared through the glass. The hall was full of people, there was a great coming and going. He could see neither Matilda nor Panoukian. He turned and walked very slowlydown the steps of the hotel. There were four steps. He reached the pavement and was very careful not to walk on the cracks. At the edge of the pavement he stopped and stared vacantly up at the Nelson Column. Small and black against the heavy clouds stood the statue, and almost with a click Old Mole’s brain began to think again, mechanically, tick-tocking like a clock, fastening on the object before his eyes, and clothing it with associations.“Nelson—Romney—Lady Hamilton—Lady Hamilton—Emma—Nelson’s enchantress—Nelson,” and so on all over again. . . . The action of his heart was barely perceptible, a slow beat, a buzzing at his ears. “Nelson—Romney——”He stood gazing up at the statue. The clouds behind it moved and gave it the appearance of moving. It was very certain that the sword moved. . . . “England expects. . . .” He gazed fascinated. A little crowd gathered. Men and women stood around and behind him and gazed up. He was aware of them, and he said:“Idiots.”But he could not move. The crowd spread over the pavement and blocked the way. A policeman appeared and moved them on. He jostled Old Mole.“Move on, there. You’re causing an obstruction.”Old Mole stared at him stupidly.The officer spoke to him again, but made no impression. Old Mole stared at the hotel as thoughhe were trying to remember something about it, but he did not move. The officer hailed a taxi, bundled him into it, and drove with him to the police station. In the charge room there was confabulation, and Old Mole gaped round him: the furniture, the large men in uniform swam mistily before him. One of the men approached him sympathetically, and he heard a voice say:“Can’t make nothink of it, sir.”His brain fastened on that as expressing something that it was trying to get clear. He felt a slight relaxation of the numbness that was upon him.Another voice said:“What’s your name?”“Name?” said Old Mole.The man in front of him said:“The Inspector says: What’s the name?”“Panoukian,” said Old Mole.VIOUT OF ITWhen the pie was opened, the birds began to sing.THE QUEEN OF HEARTSVIOUT OF ITTHE name acted as an aperitive on Old Mole’s faculties, he opened his eyes and mouth very wide and ate his breath like a fish, and began eloquently to apologize to the policemen for the trouble he had given them. He diagnosed his condition as a brief suspension of the reasoning faculties, a perfectly normal affliction to which all men were liable. The policemen listened to him stolidly and exchanged slow, heavy winks, as to say that they had indeed drawn a strange fish out of the sea of London. Their prize was soon able to give a coherent account of himself, and they let him go with no worse than a request to pay the cost of the cab in which he had been brought.There was heavy rain when he reached the streets. The people were coming out of the theaters and halls, scurrying along under umbrellas, darting for cover, wrestling their way into cabs and omnibuses and Tube stations. The streets were like black mirrors, or deep sluggish rivers, with the lights drowned in them. The people were all hurrying to get out of the rain. Old Mole was indifferent to it, and more acutely than ever was he visited by the senseof having nothing in common with them. By sheer force of numbers they presented themselves to his mind as obscene. At one point he was caught in a crowd and so offended by the smell of warm flesh, wet clothes and heated india rubber that he was for a moment possessed by a desire to strike the nearest man. He restrained himself and walked on. In front of him there were a brace of marketable women profiting by the weather to display their legs up to their knees. His mind raced back to the Puritanism in which he had been nurtured, and he was filled with the Antonine heated horror of women. . . . All the way home he was beset with sights and scenes that accentuated his disgust.It was not until he reached Gray’s Inn that he was faced with the pathetic absurdity of his situation, and then he found it unthinkable. There was not an object in the chambers but cried aloud of Matilda. She had made the place beautiful, changed its tone from masculine to feminine, and she was there though she was absent. It was very grim and horrible; like coming on the clothes of a beloved creature of whose death he had been told. He played with the idea of death voluptuously. She was dead, he told himself; his own end was not far off. The shadow of it was over the place. He went from room to room, fingering her possessions, touching the stuffs and garments he had last seen in her hands. He opened her wardrobe and thrust his hands among her soft gowns. He stood by her bed and patted the pillow and smoothed the coverlet. Hecaught sight of himself in her mirror and told himself that he could see her face, too. And she was very young, too young to be dead: and he was startlingly, haggardly old. Surely the end could not be far off.He went from room to room, picturing her in each as he had last seen her.He pushed his mood of horror to its extremity so that he was nigh sick with it.All night in his study he prowled round and round. He locked himself in, locked the outer door, locked all her rooms and pocketed the keys. She would not, she should not, come back. No one should enter. The obscenity of the streets clung to him and he could see his situation in no other light. All his life he had regarded the violation of marriage as a thing so horrible that it could only happen among monsters and therefore so remote from himself as to find no place in his calculations. There was a certain side of human life which was settled by marriage. Outside it was obscenity, from the poison of which marriages were impregnably walled in. The walls were broken down; a filthy flood swamped the fair city of his dreams, and for a short while he was near mad with thoughts of lust and jealousy and revenge. He knew it but could not away with it. There was an extraordinary pleasure, a giddy delight in yielding to the flood, giving rein to the long penned up forces of the animal in him, and breaking into childish, impotent anger.Slowly he lingered, and he began to imagine, toinvent, what others would think of him—Robert, his sister, his acquaintances at the club, and there was a sort of pleasure in the writhing of his vanity. He despised himself for it, but he wallowed in it. Never before had he seen such a quantity of mud and its appeal was irresistible.When at last he crawled out of it he sat in rueful contemplation of himself and went back to the cause of it all: the averted accident in Trafalgar Square, the hotel door swinging—the low-hanging clouds, the crowd, the Nelson statue. . . . Nelson: Emma. And Old Mole laughed: after all, there were distinguished precedents, Sir William Hamilton, most of the friends of Julius Cæsar, Hans von Bülow, George II. The thing had happened even in Thrigsby, but there it had been only a tale to laugh at, with pitying condemnation for the husband and a sudden, irrepressible envy of the lover; envy, neither more nor less; he felt gratified at the honesty of this admission, though not a little surprised at it. It was like a thin trickle of cold water upon his fever, invigorating him, so that he struggled to break through the meshes of sentimentality in which he had been caught. He broke free, and to his astonishment found himself sitting at his desk and turning over the closely written sheet which he had left on the blotting pad. He corrected a serious mistake in the topography of Trafalgar Square and went on writing. . . . The outcry of the women against the moral atmosphere of the sand heap reached up to a noble eloquence in which were declaredtheir profound pity and sympathy for the men trapped in sensuality and habitual vice. They declared their ability to think of men as suffering human beings, wounded and deformed by ignorance and prejudice, and asked only for the like true chivalry from men. He drained the vat of his ideas dry, and, at last, at five o’clock in the morning, exhausted, he went to bed.He awoke to a sense of novelty and unfamiliarity in his surroundings and in himself, welcomed the new day with the thankfulness of health, splashed lustily in his bath, jovially slapped his belly as he dried himself, and chuckled at its rotundity, regarded it as a joke, the private particular joke of middle age. Almost it seemed as though his body had a separate personality of its own, certainly it had many adventures, many inward happenings of which he was not aware, a variety of processes beyond his discernment. That amused him mightily. . . . He remembered the horrors of the night. It must have been a nightmare! Of course, a nightmare was often followed with a feeling of health and a grotesque humor!There were three letters on his breakfast table. One was from Matilda, posted the day before at the Sussex village. She said she was well, though the weather was bad, and she was getting rather more loneliness than she had bargained for. She sent her love and hoped he was happy without her. He tore up the letter and burned it, and turned back the thoughts and memories it had summoned forth. Heapplied himself hungrily to his breakfast and took careful note of the process of eating, trying to discover why it should be pleasant and why, slowly, it should take the zest off his appetite for the day’s doings.“Queer,” he thought, “how little interest we take in the body. It might be an unfailing source of entertainment. It is not so certain neither that it is not wiser than the mind.”All day he harped on thoughts of the body and was fiercely busy scrubbing his own clean of the base ideas of the night. He was fairly rid of them at last toward evening, but his mind was in a horrid confusion, and he was rather alarmed at the hard appearance of actuality taken on by his body. It blotted everything else out. He saw it in the masked light and shade of dirt and cleanliness. From that he went on to the other seeming opposites—life and death, love and hate, vice and virtue, light and darkness—found so many of them that he was semi-hypnotized and sank into an unthinking contemplation. There was good and there was bad, two points, in the catenary of which he was slung as in a hammock, with the void beneath. . . . Life as an exact equation was an impossible, appalling idea; but he could not break free from it. He could not escape from the trite dualism of things. . . . From the stupor of ideas he returned to his body and found in that the same tyranny of the number two: he had two eyes, two ears, two hands, two feet, two lungs, two kidneys. It comforted him greatly toreflect that he had only one heart, one nose, one mouth.“Bah!” he said, “I am making a bogey of my own shadow.”And he resolved to take a Turkish bath before dining at the club. He did so, and was baked and kneaded and pummeled and lathered back into a tolerable humor, and, as he lay swathed in warm towels and smoking an excellent cigar, he faced the situation, yielded to it, let it sting and nip at his heart, and was so racked with its pain that he could form no clear idea of it, nor struggle, but only lie limp and pray to God, or whatever devil had let such furies loose upon him, that the worst might soon be over before he was betrayed into any brutal or foolish act. He was amazed to find that his vanity had been slain: it had died in the night of shock, so he diagnosed it. No longer was he concerned with what other people would think of himself. The cruel pain twinged the sharper for it, and he saw that vanity is a protective crust, a shell grown by man to cover his nakedness. . . . His general ideas were clear enough: and the amusement of them served to distract him in his agony. It tickled him to think of a Turkish bath in Jermyn Street as the scene of such a mighty sorrow, and said:“So much the better for the Turkish bath. It becomes the equal of Troy or Elsinore or the palace of Andromache, and nobler, for mine is a real and no poet’s tragedy. It is a true tragedy, or, my vanity being dead, I should not bother my head about it. . . . Ismy vanity dead? I have shed it as a crab his claw or a lizard his tail. It will grow again.”He sank deep into pain until it seemed to him he could suffer no more, and then he went over to his club and dined fastidiously—a crab (to inspect its claw), a quail, and a devil on horseback, with a bottle of claret, very deliberately selected in consultation with the head waiter. Throughout his meal he read the wine list from cover to cover and back again, and thought how closely it resembled the Thrigsby school list. It contained so many familiar names that he was put out at its not including Panoukian’s, and of Panoukian slowly he began to think: at first sleepily and in the gross content of his good dinner, as a wine, heady, sparkling, inclined to rawness, too soon bottled, or too soon uncorked, he could not be certain which. Then he thought of Panoukian as a man, and a savage anger burst in upon him, and he thought of Panoukian’s deed as the atmosphere of the club dictated he should think of it. Panoukian had acted dirtily and dishonorably: he should be hounded out, hounded out. Panoukian had wormed himself into his (Old Mole’s) affections and trust, to betray both. He had shown himself a cad, a blackguard, a breaker of the laws of hospitality and good society. . . . There was a solid plumpness in this conception of Panoukian that pleased Old Mole almost sensually, gave him the same sort of mouth-watering anticipation as the breast had done of the quail he had just eaten. He had Panoukian nicely dished up, brown,done to a turn: he would poise the knife for one gloating moment, plunge it in, and cleave the ripe morsel from breast to back. Panoukian had been cooked by his own actions: he deserved the knife and the crunch of teeth. Old Mole, like many another good man wronged, felt ogreish. . . . He began in his head (and with the aid of the wine in his head) to compose letters to Panoukian, commencing “Sir” or “Dear Sir,” or, without approach, plunging into such a sentence as: “No matter how public the place, or how painful to myself, I shall, when I next meet you, be obliged to thrash you.”And he gloated over the thoughts of thrashing Panoukian: mentally chose the stick, a whippy cane; the fleshy portion of Panoukian’s anatomy under the tails of his too-much-waisted coat. He rejoiced in the scene. It might be in the House, under the eyes of all the Harbottles: or, better still, in the Temple before the grinning porters.He was brought to himself by a crash and a tinkle. He had waved his fork in the air and knocked over his last glass of claret. The head waiter concealed his annoyance in fatherly solicitude and professional business, and suggested another half-bottle. Weakly Old Mole consented, and while he was waiting, after collecting his thoughts, found that they had left Panoukian and come to Matilda. Her image was blurred: his love had become sorrow and a creeping torment, and the torment was Matilda, the blood in his veins, inseparable from himself. And because she was inseparable Panoukianbecame so, too. There could be no gain in thrashing Panoukian: that was just blustering nonsense; “defending his honor” was the phrase. Idiots! He looked round at the other diners. What was the good of defending that which was lost? What was there to defend? You might as well ask a sea captain whose ship had been blown up by a mine why on earth he did not use his guns. . . . Further, honor was a word for which he could find no precise meaning. It was much in vogue in the theater, from Copas to Butcher. A woman’s honor apparently meant her chastity. A man’s honor, in some very complicated way, seemed to be bound up in the preservation of woman’s, as though she herself were to have no say in the matter. No; honor would not do: it was only a red herring trailed across the scent.Next came the cause of morality, which demanded the punishment of offenders. To his consternation he found himself thinking of the affair impersonally, pharisaically, inhumanly, detaching himself from Matilda, thrusting her violently away, giving her a dig or two with the goad of self-righteousness, and swelling at the neck with conscious rectitude. Why? . . . She must suffer for her sins.Sin?Sünde, pécher.He thought of it in three or four languages, but in all it created an impression of overstatement and, more, of bad taste. He had lived for so long with a warm, intimate idea of Matilda that he resented the intrusion of morality,bidding him stand above her, judge and condemn. It might be simpler, the easiest attitude to adopt—a suit of ready-made mental clothes, reach-me-downs—but it was uncomfortable, cold, and, most astonishing of all, degrading. It was to be impersonal in a desperately personal matter.Ça ne va pas.
Rolling, rolling in the heather,All in the bonny August weather,There was me and Leezy Lochy in the dingle,There was Jock and Maggie Kay in the dell,For ilka lassie has her laddie,And ilka laddie has his lassie,And what they dae together I’ll na tell,But Leezy, Leezy Lochy in the dingle,Is bonny as the moon above the heather.
Rolling, rolling in the heather,
All in the bonny August weather,
There was me and Leezy Lochy in the dingle,
There was Jock and Maggie Kay in the dell,
For ilka lassie has her laddie,
And ilka laddie has his lassie,
And what they dae together I’ll na tell,
But Leezy, Leezy Lochy in the dingle,
Is bonny as the moon above the heather.
Matilda sang the song all through and made Old Mole and Panoukian troll the chorus. There were a freshness and warmth about her that were almost startling, full of mischief and sparkling fun. Sheteased both the men and mysteriously promised them a great reward if they could guess a riddle.
“My second is in woman but not in man, my first is French, I have two syllables, and you’ll never guess.”
“Where did you get it?” asked Panoukian.
“I made it up.”
So they tried to guess and soon confessed themselves beaten. Then she told them that the second half of the riddle wassense, because she never knew a man who had it; and the first half wasnonand together they madenonsense, because she felt like it.
Her mood lasted for five days. Panoukian came in every evening—(she was rehearsing for a new play, but only in the daytime)—and they frolicked and sang and burlesqued their own solemn discussions. On the sixth day her high spirits sank and she was moody and silent. She forbade Panoukian to come in the evening. He came at teatime, and she stayed out. One day Old Mole had tea with Panoukian. They walked in the Temple Gardens afterward, and Panoukian blurted out:
“I don’t know if your wife has told you, sir, but after we left the Schlegelmeiers’ it was such a glorious night, and we were so glad to be in the air again, that we took a taxi and drove down to Richmond and came back in the dawn. There wasn’t any harm in it, as you and I see things, but I’ve been thinking it over and come to the conclusion that you ought to know.”
A sudden anger took possession of Old Mole, and he retorted:
“Of course, if there were any harm in it, you wouldn’t tell me.”
“Hang it all, sir. You haven’t any right to say that to me.”
“No, no. Quite right. I haven’t. No. I beg your pardon. I’m glad to see you such friends. She isn’t very good at making friends. Acquaintances come and go, but there seem to be very few people whom she and I can share.”
“I have the profoundest respect for her,” said Panoukian. “As we were coming back in the dawn she told me all her life. The things she has suffered, the misery she has come through.”
And they fraternized in their sympathy for Matilda. Panoukian gave an instance of her early sufferings. She had never told it to her husband, and he returned to Gray’s Inn puzzled and uneasy, to find her sitting idle, doing nothing, with no pretence at activity. He was tender with her, and asked if she might be ill. She said no, but she had been thinking and wanted to know what was the good of anything. She said she knew she never could be like the other women they knew; it wasn’t any good, they seemed to feel that she was different and hadn’t had their education and pleasant girlhood, and they only wanted her because they thought she was a success. He told her that he wanted nothing less than for her to be like the other women, that he never wanted her to live in and be one of the crowd,but only to be herself, her own brave, delightful self.
“That’s what Arthur says.” (They had begun to call PanoukianArthurduring their few days of high spirits.) “He says you’ve got to be yourself or nothing. And I don’t understand, and thinking makes it so hard. . . .” She did not want him to speak. She said, “You still love me? You still want me?”
And there came back to him almost the love of their wanderings, the old desire with its sting of jealousy.
For three days after that she never once spoke to him.
It seemed she wrote to Panoukian, for he appeared again on her last night before the opening of the new play, and was there when she returned from the dress rehearsal. She shook hands with him, made him sit by the fireplace opposite Old Mole, took up some sewing, and said:
“Now talk.”
After some diffidence Panoukian began, and they came round to “Lossie Loses,” the last weeks of which had at length been announced. It would have run for two years and two months. Panoukian’s theory of its success was that people were much like children, and once they were pleased with a story wanted it told over and over again without a single variation.
“The public,” said Matilda, “are very funny. When they don’t listen to you, you think them idiots;when they do, you adore them and think them wonderful.”
“I have never felt anything but contempt for them for liking ‘Lossie Loses,’ ” said Old Mole.
“But then,” put in Panoukian, “you did not write it. If you had, you would be persuaded by now that it is a masterpiece. That is how Harbottles are made: they attribute their flukes to their skill and insist on being given credit for them.”
“I often wonder,” said Old Mole, “what the man who wrote it thinks about it. He must surely know by now.”
“He must be dead.” Matilda swept him out of consideration with her needle. “I don’t believe any man would have let it go on so long and not come forward.”
Panoukian examined the ethical aspect of the situation, and from that they passed to the discussion of morals, whether there was in fact any valid morality in England, or simply those things were not done which were unpleasant in their consequences. The Ten Commandments were presumably the basis of the nation’s morality, since they were read publicly in places of worship every Sunday (though the majority of the adult population never went near any place of worship). How many of the Commandments were closely observed, how many (in the general custom) met with compromise, how many neglected? Murder and the more obvious forms of theft were punished; deliberate and wicked fraud, also, but at every turn the morality had beenmodified, its bad admitted to be not always and altogether bad, its good equally subject to qualification. It had been whittled and chipped away by non-observance until practically all that was left was a bad consisting of actions which were a palpable nuisance to society, with never a good at all.
“Either,” said Panoukian, “the Jewish morality has never been suitable for the Western races or they have never been intelligent enough to grasp its intention or its applicability to the facts of life and the uses of society.”
“I wish you wouldn’t use so many long words,” said Matilda.
But Panoukian rushed on:
“I can’t believe in the justice of a morality which is based on the idea of punishment. It is inevitable that such a system should set a premium on skill in evading consequences rather than on right action.”
“I believe,” said Old Mole, “in tolerance, you can’t begin to hold a moral idea without that.”
“Right,” said Matilda, “is right and wrong is wrong. I always know when I’m doing right and when I’m doing wrong.”
“But you do it all the same?” asked Panoukian.
“Oh, yes.”
“And so does every healthy human being. So much for morality.”
“Don’t you believe that people are always punished?” asked Old Mole.
“Certainly not. There are thousands of men who go scot free, and so sink into self-righteousness thatmore than half their faculties atrophy, and not even the most disastrous calamity, not even the most terrible spiritual affliction, can penetrate to their minds.”
“That,” said Old Mole, “is the most horrible of punishments and seems to me to show that there is a moral principle in the universe. I find it difficult to understand why moralists are not content to leave it at that, but I have observed that men apply one morality to the actions of others and another to their own. The wicked often prosper, and the righteous are filled with envy and pass judgment, wherein they cease to be righteous.”
“My father,” said Matilda, “was a very bad man, but I was fond of him. My mother was a good woman, and I never could abide her.”
“It is all a matter of affection,” quoth Panoukian with more than his usual emphasis.
“I agree,” muttered Old Mole.
And all three were surprised at this conclusion. They were uneasily silent for a moment or two, when Panoukian departed. Then Matilda rose and came to her husband and held out her hand. He took it in both his and looked up at her.
“Good night,” she said.
“Good night.”
“Until to-morrow.”
And slowly the smile he loved came to her face. Warmed by it and encouraged, he said:
“Is anything worrying you?”
The smile disappeared.
“No. Nothing. I’m beginning to think about things, and you. It’s all so queer. . . . Good night.”
And she was gone.
He attended the first night of the new play. Matilda had a larger part, and one very short scene of emotion, or, at least, of what passed for it in the English theater of those days, that is to say it was a nervous and sentimental excitement altogether disproportionate to the action, and not built into the structure of the play, but plastered on to it to conceal an alarming crack in the brickwork. Matilda did very well and only for a moment let the scene slip out of the atmosphere of gimcrackery into the air of life. She did this through defective technique, but that one moment of genuine feeling, even in so false a cause, was so startling as to whip the audience out of its comfortable lethargy into something that was so near pleasure that they could not but applaud. It was an artistic error, since it was her business to be as banal and shallow as the play, which had been made with great mechanical skill so that it required only the superficial service of the actors, and, unlike the candle of the Lord, made no attempt to “search out the inward parts of the belly.” In her part Matilda had to discover and betray in one moment her love for the foppish hero of the piece, and being, as aforesaid, wanting in her technical equipment, drew, for the purpose of the scene, on her own imagination, and that which—though she might not know it—had possession of it. The audience was startled into pleasure, Old Mole into something like terror. There was in the woman there on the stage a power, a quality, an essence—he could not find the word—on which he had never counted, for which he had never looked, which now, he most passionately desired to make his own. He knew that it was not artistry in her, his own response to it had too profoundly shaken him; it was living fire, flesh of her flesh, and marvelously made her, for the first time, kin and kind with him. And he knew then that he had been living on theory about her, and was so contemptuous of it and of himself that he brushed aside all thought of the past, all musings and speculations, and was all eagerness to join her, to tell her of the amazing convulsion of himself, and how, at last, through this accident, he had recognized her for what she was. . . . He could not sit through the rest of the play. Its artificiality, its inane falsehood disgusted him. He went out into the brilliantly lighted streets and walked furiously up and down, up and down, and on. And the men and women in the streets seemed small and mechanical, utterly devoid of the vital principle he had discerned in his wife’s eyes, voice, gesture, as she played her part. They were just a crowd, mincing and strutting, bound together by nothing but the capacity to move, to place one leg before another and proceed from one point to another of the earth’s surface. He had that in common with them, but nothing else: nothing that bound him tothem. (So he told himself, and so truly he thought, for he was comparing a moment of real experience with a series of impressions made on him by his surroundings.) He walked up and down the glittering streets, streaked with white and yellow and green and purple lights, and the commotion in him waxed greater. . . . When he returned to the theater Matilda was gone, and had left no message for him.
He found her in her bed, with the light on, reading. She had undressed hastily and her clothes were littered about the room in an untidiness most unusual with her. She stuffed what she was reading under her pillow.
“You didn’t wait for me,” he said.
“No. I didn’t want to see anybody. I rushed away before the end.”
“Anything wrong?”
“I hate the theater. I hate it all, the people in it, the blinding lights, the painted scenery, the audience, oh! the audience! I don’t ever want to go near it again. It’s just playing and pretending. . . .”
“The piece was certainly nothing but a pretence at drama.”
“Oh! Don’t talk about it.”
“But I want to know what has upset you.”
“I can’t tell you. I don’t know myself. I only know that I’m miserable, miserable. Just let me be.”
He had learned that when she was ill or out of sorts or depressed she never had any desire left inher but to curl up and hide herself away. At such times the diffidence inherent in her character seemed wholly to master her, and there was no rousing her to a better grace. He withdrew, his exaltation dampened, and repaired to his study, where in the dark at his desk in the window he sat gazing out into the night, at the few lighted windows of the Inn, and the bruise-colored glow of the sky. He could think only of her and now it seemed to him that he could really lose himself and live in her, and through her come to love. He remembered how, when she was rehearsing, he had asked how she was progressing, and she had replied: “I shall never get it. Either the part’s all wrong or I am.” And that evening she had “got it,” reached what the author had been fumbling after, the authentic note of human utterance, the involuntary expression of love. It had alarmed himself: how devastating must it then have seemed to her! It was almost horrible in its irrelevance. It came from neither of them and yet it was theirs, but not for sharing. It had driven her, like a beast on a stroke of illness, to hide away from him, but through her and only through her could he approach it. The abruptness of its outburst, its geyser-like upward thrust, made it alone seem natural and all their life of habit artificial and shabby; how much more then the stale and outworn tricks of the theater! He approached it, worshiping, marveling at the sense of release in his soul, and knew that, with the power it gave him, he had bitten through the crust of life, whereat he hadbeen nibbling and gnawing with his mind and picking with the chipped flints of philosophies. And he was awed into humility, into admission of his own impotence, into perception, clear and whole, of the immensity of its life’s purpose, of its huge force and mighty volume bearing the folly and turbulence of mind and flesh lightly on its bosom, so that a man must accept life as to be lived, can never be its master, but only its honorable servant or its miserable slave. He had then the sense of being one with life, from which nothing was severed, not the smallest bubble of a thought, not the least grain of a desire, of possessing all his force and a boundless reserve of force, and he whispered:
“I love.”
And the mighty sound of it filled all the chambers of his life, so that he was rich beyond dreams.
He laid his head in his arms and wept. His tears washed away the stains of memory, the scars and spotted dust upon his soul, and he knew now that he had no longer to deal with an idea of life, but with life itself, and he was filled with the desperate courage of his smallness.
For a brief space after a storm of summer rain the world is a place of glowing color, of flowing, harmonious lines. So it was now with Old Mole, and he discovered the charm of things. His habitual life went on undisturbed, and he could find pleasure even in that. His love for Matilda reduced him to a sort of passiveness, so that he asked nothing ofher, gave her of himself only so much as she demanded, and was content to watch her, to be with her, to feel that he was in no way impeding her progress.
She showed no change save that there was a sort of effort in her self-control, as though she were deliberately maintaining her old attitude toward him. She never made any further allusion to her avowed hatred of the theater, and returned to it as though nothing had suffered. He told himself that it was perhaps only a mood of exhaustion, or that, though she might have passed through a crisis, yet it was possible for her to be unaware of it, so that its effects would only gradually become visible and very slowly translated into action. After all, she was still very young, and the young are mercifully spared having to face their crises. . . . When he went to see her play her part again she had mastered her scene by artistry; the almost barbaric splendor of her outburst was gone; she had a trick for it, and her little scene became, as it was intended to be, only a cog in the elaborate machinery by which the entertainment moved.
This time Panoukian was with him, and denounced the piece as an abomination, a fraud upon the public—(who liked it immensely)—and he produced a very ingenious, subtle diagnosis of the diseases that were upon it and submitted it to a thorough and brutal vivisection, act by act, as they sat through it. Old Mole was astonished to find that Panoukian’s violence annoyed him, offended him asan injustice, and, though he did not tell him so, saw clearly that he was applying to the piece a standard which had never for one moment been in the mind of the author, whose concern had been to the best of his no great powers to contrive an amusing traffic which should please everybody and offend none, supply the leading actors with good and intrinsically flattering parts, tickle the public into paying for its long-continued presentation, and so pay the rent of the theater, the formidable salary list, and provide for the satisfaction of his pleasures, the caprices of his extremely expensive wife, and his by no means peculiar mania for appearing in the columns of the newspapers and illustrated journals; pure Harbottling; but it had nothing at all to do with what Panoukian was talking about, namely, art. It was certainly all out of drawing and its moral perspective was all awry, but it was hardly more fantastical and disproportionate than Panoukian’s criticism. It was entirely unimportant: to apply a serious standard to it was to raise it to a level in the mind to which it had no right. Of the two, the author and Panoukian, he was not sure but Panoukian was the greater fool. However, extending his indulgence from one to the other, he let the young man talk his fill, and said nothing. He had begun to treasure silence.
He loved the silent evenings in Gray’s Inn, where he could sit and smoke and chuckle over the world’s absurdity, and ponder the ways of men so variously revealed to him in the last few years, and gloatover his own happiness and dream of the days when Matilda should have come to the full bloom of her nature and they would perfectly understand each other, and then life would be a full creation, as full and varied, as largely moving as the passing of the seasons. He had delightful dreams of the time when she would fully share his silence, the immense region beyond words. He was full of happiness, gummy with it, like a plum ripe for plucking—or falling.
In his fullness of living—the very top, he told himself, of his age, of a man’s life—he found it easy to cover paper with his thoughts and memories, delightful and easy to mold them into form, and to amuse himself he began a work which he called “Out of Bounds,” half treatise, half satire on education, dry, humorous, mocking, in which he drew a picture of the members of his old profession engaged in hacking down the imaginations of children and feeding the barren stumps of their minds with the sawdust of the conventional curricula. He was very zestful in this employment, perfectly content that Matilda should be even less demonstrative than before, telling himself that she was wrestling with the after effects of her crisis and would turn to him and his affection when she needed them. He made rapid progress with his work.
“Lossie Loses” came to an end at last, and he counted the spoils. He had gained many thousands of pounds—(the play was still running in America)—a few amusing acquaintances, a career for hiswife, and an insight into the workings of London’s work and pleasure which he would have found it hard to come by otherwise. He chuckled over it all and flung himself with fresh ardor into his work.
After the hundredth performance of her play Matilda declared that she was tired, and wanted a rest, and she threw up her part. She came to him and said she wished to go away.
“Very well. Where shall we go?”
“I want to go alone.”
And she waited as though she expected a protest from him. For a moment she gazed at him almost with pleading in her eyes, and then she governed herself, stood before him almost assertively and repeated:
“Alone.”
In the aggression he felt the strain in her and told himself she was wanting to get away from him, to break the habit of their life, to come back to him fresh, to advance toward him, reach up to the prize he held in his hands. He told himself that to break in upon her diffidence might only be to thicken the wall she—(he said it was she)—had raised between them. He said:
“Won’t you mind?”
“No. I want to be alone.”
“Where will you go then?”
“I don’t know. Anywhere. By the sea, I think.”
He suggested the Yorkshire coast, but she said that was too far and she didn’t like the North.
“Oh! No!” he said. “Want to forget it?”
She passed that by.
He took down a map, and she looked along the south coast and pitched on a place in Sussex, because it was far from the railway and would therefore be quiet. He left his work, wired to the hotel for rooms, sat and talked to her as she packed, saw her off the next morning and returned to his work, rejoicing in the silence and emptiness of the chambers.
He sent her letters on to her without particularly noticing their superscription. On the third day a letter came for her, and he recognized the handwriting as Panoukian’s. He sent that on. When his work went swimmingly and his pen raced he wrote to her, long, droll, affectionate epistles: when his work hobbled then he did not write and hardly gave a thought to her. She wrote to him in her awkward hand with gauche, conventional descriptions of the scenery amid which she was living. He read them and they gave him fresh light on education. He was reaching the constructive part of his work, and it began to take shape as an exposition of the methods by which the essential Matilda might have been freed of the diffidence and self-distrust which hemmed her in. That brought him to feminism, and he imagined a description of women in Trafalgar Square screaming in a shrill eloquence for deliverance from the captivity into which they had been cast by the morals of the sand heap. He was keenly interested in this scene, and, as he had sketched it, was not sure that he had the topography of the Square exact.
One evening, therefore, he dined at his club, meaning to walk home by the Square and the Strand. He was drawn into an argument and did not set out before ten o’clock. It was one of those nights when heavy clouds lumber low over the city and absorb the light, break the chain of it so that the great arcs are like dotted lanterns, and behind them buildings loom. He turned down Parliament Street to get the full effect of this across the Square, and then came up across and across it, carefully observing how the great thoroughfares lay in relation to the Nelson Column. As, finally, he was crossing to the Strand he was almost dashed over by a taxicab, drew back, looked up, saw his wife gazing startled out of the window. He stared at her, but she did not recognize him and seemed to be entirely absorbed in the fright and shock of the avoided accident. He followed the car with his eyes. It had turned sharply in the middle of the road to pass into the southward stream of traffic. He saw it slow down and draw up outside a huge hotel, and hurried after it. The porter came out and opened the door. Matilda stepped to the pavement, and after her Panoukian. They passed in through the revolving door of the hotel just as he reached the pavement. The porter staggered in with Matilda’s portmanteau.
Old Mole lunged forward on an impulse. He reached the door and glared through the glass. The hall was full of people, there was a great coming and going. He could see neither Matilda nor Panoukian. He turned and walked very slowlydown the steps of the hotel. There were four steps. He reached the pavement and was very careful not to walk on the cracks. At the edge of the pavement he stopped and stared vacantly up at the Nelson Column. Small and black against the heavy clouds stood the statue, and almost with a click Old Mole’s brain began to think again, mechanically, tick-tocking like a clock, fastening on the object before his eyes, and clothing it with associations.
“Nelson—Romney—Lady Hamilton—Lady Hamilton—Emma—Nelson’s enchantress—Nelson,” and so on all over again. . . . The action of his heart was barely perceptible, a slow beat, a buzzing at his ears. “Nelson—Romney——”
He stood gazing up at the statue. The clouds behind it moved and gave it the appearance of moving. It was very certain that the sword moved. . . . “England expects. . . .” He gazed fascinated. A little crowd gathered. Men and women stood around and behind him and gazed up. He was aware of them, and he said:
“Idiots.”
But he could not move. The crowd spread over the pavement and blocked the way. A policeman appeared and moved them on. He jostled Old Mole.
“Move on, there. You’re causing an obstruction.”
Old Mole stared at him stupidly.
The officer spoke to him again, but made no impression. Old Mole stared at the hotel as thoughhe were trying to remember something about it, but he did not move. The officer hailed a taxi, bundled him into it, and drove with him to the police station. In the charge room there was confabulation, and Old Mole gaped round him: the furniture, the large men in uniform swam mistily before him. One of the men approached him sympathetically, and he heard a voice say:
“Can’t make nothink of it, sir.”
His brain fastened on that as expressing something that it was trying to get clear. He felt a slight relaxation of the numbness that was upon him.
Another voice said:
“What’s your name?”
“Name?” said Old Mole.
The man in front of him said:
“The Inspector says: What’s the name?”
“Panoukian,” said Old Mole.
When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing.
THE QUEEN OF HEARTS
VIOUT OF IT
THE name acted as an aperitive on Old Mole’s faculties, he opened his eyes and mouth very wide and ate his breath like a fish, and began eloquently to apologize to the policemen for the trouble he had given them. He diagnosed his condition as a brief suspension of the reasoning faculties, a perfectly normal affliction to which all men were liable. The policemen listened to him stolidly and exchanged slow, heavy winks, as to say that they had indeed drawn a strange fish out of the sea of London. Their prize was soon able to give a coherent account of himself, and they let him go with no worse than a request to pay the cost of the cab in which he had been brought.
There was heavy rain when he reached the streets. The people were coming out of the theaters and halls, scurrying along under umbrellas, darting for cover, wrestling their way into cabs and omnibuses and Tube stations. The streets were like black mirrors, or deep sluggish rivers, with the lights drowned in them. The people were all hurrying to get out of the rain. Old Mole was indifferent to it, and more acutely than ever was he visited by the senseof having nothing in common with them. By sheer force of numbers they presented themselves to his mind as obscene. At one point he was caught in a crowd and so offended by the smell of warm flesh, wet clothes and heated india rubber that he was for a moment possessed by a desire to strike the nearest man. He restrained himself and walked on. In front of him there were a brace of marketable women profiting by the weather to display their legs up to their knees. His mind raced back to the Puritanism in which he had been nurtured, and he was filled with the Antonine heated horror of women. . . . All the way home he was beset with sights and scenes that accentuated his disgust.
It was not until he reached Gray’s Inn that he was faced with the pathetic absurdity of his situation, and then he found it unthinkable. There was not an object in the chambers but cried aloud of Matilda. She had made the place beautiful, changed its tone from masculine to feminine, and she was there though she was absent. It was very grim and horrible; like coming on the clothes of a beloved creature of whose death he had been told. He played with the idea of death voluptuously. She was dead, he told himself; his own end was not far off. The shadow of it was over the place. He went from room to room, fingering her possessions, touching the stuffs and garments he had last seen in her hands. He opened her wardrobe and thrust his hands among her soft gowns. He stood by her bed and patted the pillow and smoothed the coverlet. Hecaught sight of himself in her mirror and told himself that he could see her face, too. And she was very young, too young to be dead: and he was startlingly, haggardly old. Surely the end could not be far off.
He went from room to room, picturing her in each as he had last seen her.
He pushed his mood of horror to its extremity so that he was nigh sick with it.
All night in his study he prowled round and round. He locked himself in, locked the outer door, locked all her rooms and pocketed the keys. She would not, she should not, come back. No one should enter. The obscenity of the streets clung to him and he could see his situation in no other light. All his life he had regarded the violation of marriage as a thing so horrible that it could only happen among monsters and therefore so remote from himself as to find no place in his calculations. There was a certain side of human life which was settled by marriage. Outside it was obscenity, from the poison of which marriages were impregnably walled in. The walls were broken down; a filthy flood swamped the fair city of his dreams, and for a short while he was near mad with thoughts of lust and jealousy and revenge. He knew it but could not away with it. There was an extraordinary pleasure, a giddy delight in yielding to the flood, giving rein to the long penned up forces of the animal in him, and breaking into childish, impotent anger.
Slowly he lingered, and he began to imagine, toinvent, what others would think of him—Robert, his sister, his acquaintances at the club, and there was a sort of pleasure in the writhing of his vanity. He despised himself for it, but he wallowed in it. Never before had he seen such a quantity of mud and its appeal was irresistible.
When at last he crawled out of it he sat in rueful contemplation of himself and went back to the cause of it all: the averted accident in Trafalgar Square, the hotel door swinging—the low-hanging clouds, the crowd, the Nelson statue. . . . Nelson: Emma. And Old Mole laughed: after all, there were distinguished precedents, Sir William Hamilton, most of the friends of Julius Cæsar, Hans von Bülow, George II. The thing had happened even in Thrigsby, but there it had been only a tale to laugh at, with pitying condemnation for the husband and a sudden, irrepressible envy of the lover; envy, neither more nor less; he felt gratified at the honesty of this admission, though not a little surprised at it. It was like a thin trickle of cold water upon his fever, invigorating him, so that he struggled to break through the meshes of sentimentality in which he had been caught. He broke free, and to his astonishment found himself sitting at his desk and turning over the closely written sheet which he had left on the blotting pad. He corrected a serious mistake in the topography of Trafalgar Square and went on writing. . . . The outcry of the women against the moral atmosphere of the sand heap reached up to a noble eloquence in which were declaredtheir profound pity and sympathy for the men trapped in sensuality and habitual vice. They declared their ability to think of men as suffering human beings, wounded and deformed by ignorance and prejudice, and asked only for the like true chivalry from men. He drained the vat of his ideas dry, and, at last, at five o’clock in the morning, exhausted, he went to bed.
He awoke to a sense of novelty and unfamiliarity in his surroundings and in himself, welcomed the new day with the thankfulness of health, splashed lustily in his bath, jovially slapped his belly as he dried himself, and chuckled at its rotundity, regarded it as a joke, the private particular joke of middle age. Almost it seemed as though his body had a separate personality of its own, certainly it had many adventures, many inward happenings of which he was not aware, a variety of processes beyond his discernment. That amused him mightily. . . . He remembered the horrors of the night. It must have been a nightmare! Of course, a nightmare was often followed with a feeling of health and a grotesque humor!
There were three letters on his breakfast table. One was from Matilda, posted the day before at the Sussex village. She said she was well, though the weather was bad, and she was getting rather more loneliness than she had bargained for. She sent her love and hoped he was happy without her. He tore up the letter and burned it, and turned back the thoughts and memories it had summoned forth. Heapplied himself hungrily to his breakfast and took careful note of the process of eating, trying to discover why it should be pleasant and why, slowly, it should take the zest off his appetite for the day’s doings.
“Queer,” he thought, “how little interest we take in the body. It might be an unfailing source of entertainment. It is not so certain neither that it is not wiser than the mind.”
All day he harped on thoughts of the body and was fiercely busy scrubbing his own clean of the base ideas of the night. He was fairly rid of them at last toward evening, but his mind was in a horrid confusion, and he was rather alarmed at the hard appearance of actuality taken on by his body. It blotted everything else out. He saw it in the masked light and shade of dirt and cleanliness. From that he went on to the other seeming opposites—life and death, love and hate, vice and virtue, light and darkness—found so many of them that he was semi-hypnotized and sank into an unthinking contemplation. There was good and there was bad, two points, in the catenary of which he was slung as in a hammock, with the void beneath. . . . Life as an exact equation was an impossible, appalling idea; but he could not break free from it. He could not escape from the trite dualism of things. . . . From the stupor of ideas he returned to his body and found in that the same tyranny of the number two: he had two eyes, two ears, two hands, two feet, two lungs, two kidneys. It comforted him greatly toreflect that he had only one heart, one nose, one mouth.
“Bah!” he said, “I am making a bogey of my own shadow.”
And he resolved to take a Turkish bath before dining at the club. He did so, and was baked and kneaded and pummeled and lathered back into a tolerable humor, and, as he lay swathed in warm towels and smoking an excellent cigar, he faced the situation, yielded to it, let it sting and nip at his heart, and was so racked with its pain that he could form no clear idea of it, nor struggle, but only lie limp and pray to God, or whatever devil had let such furies loose upon him, that the worst might soon be over before he was betrayed into any brutal or foolish act. He was amazed to find that his vanity had been slain: it had died in the night of shock, so he diagnosed it. No longer was he concerned with what other people would think of himself. The cruel pain twinged the sharper for it, and he saw that vanity is a protective crust, a shell grown by man to cover his nakedness. . . . His general ideas were clear enough: and the amusement of them served to distract him in his agony. It tickled him to think of a Turkish bath in Jermyn Street as the scene of such a mighty sorrow, and said:
“So much the better for the Turkish bath. It becomes the equal of Troy or Elsinore or the palace of Andromache, and nobler, for mine is a real and no poet’s tragedy. It is a true tragedy, or, my vanity being dead, I should not bother my head about it. . . . Ismy vanity dead? I have shed it as a crab his claw or a lizard his tail. It will grow again.”
He sank deep into pain until it seemed to him he could suffer no more, and then he went over to his club and dined fastidiously—a crab (to inspect its claw), a quail, and a devil on horseback, with a bottle of claret, very deliberately selected in consultation with the head waiter. Throughout his meal he read the wine list from cover to cover and back again, and thought how closely it resembled the Thrigsby school list. It contained so many familiar names that he was put out at its not including Panoukian’s, and of Panoukian slowly he began to think: at first sleepily and in the gross content of his good dinner, as a wine, heady, sparkling, inclined to rawness, too soon bottled, or too soon uncorked, he could not be certain which. Then he thought of Panoukian as a man, and a savage anger burst in upon him, and he thought of Panoukian’s deed as the atmosphere of the club dictated he should think of it. Panoukian had acted dirtily and dishonorably: he should be hounded out, hounded out. Panoukian had wormed himself into his (Old Mole’s) affections and trust, to betray both. He had shown himself a cad, a blackguard, a breaker of the laws of hospitality and good society. . . . There was a solid plumpness in this conception of Panoukian that pleased Old Mole almost sensually, gave him the same sort of mouth-watering anticipation as the breast had done of the quail he had just eaten. He had Panoukian nicely dished up, brown,done to a turn: he would poise the knife for one gloating moment, plunge it in, and cleave the ripe morsel from breast to back. Panoukian had been cooked by his own actions: he deserved the knife and the crunch of teeth. Old Mole, like many another good man wronged, felt ogreish. . . . He began in his head (and with the aid of the wine in his head) to compose letters to Panoukian, commencing “Sir” or “Dear Sir,” or, without approach, plunging into such a sentence as: “No matter how public the place, or how painful to myself, I shall, when I next meet you, be obliged to thrash you.”
And he gloated over the thoughts of thrashing Panoukian: mentally chose the stick, a whippy cane; the fleshy portion of Panoukian’s anatomy under the tails of his too-much-waisted coat. He rejoiced in the scene. It might be in the House, under the eyes of all the Harbottles: or, better still, in the Temple before the grinning porters.
He was brought to himself by a crash and a tinkle. He had waved his fork in the air and knocked over his last glass of claret. The head waiter concealed his annoyance in fatherly solicitude and professional business, and suggested another half-bottle. Weakly Old Mole consented, and while he was waiting, after collecting his thoughts, found that they had left Panoukian and come to Matilda. Her image was blurred: his love had become sorrow and a creeping torment, and the torment was Matilda, the blood in his veins, inseparable from himself. And because she was inseparable Panoukianbecame so, too. There could be no gain in thrashing Panoukian: that was just blustering nonsense; “defending his honor” was the phrase. Idiots! He looked round at the other diners. What was the good of defending that which was lost? What was there to defend? You might as well ask a sea captain whose ship had been blown up by a mine why on earth he did not use his guns. . . . Further, honor was a word for which he could find no precise meaning. It was much in vogue in the theater, from Copas to Butcher. A woman’s honor apparently meant her chastity. A man’s honor, in some very complicated way, seemed to be bound up in the preservation of woman’s, as though she herself were to have no say in the matter. No; honor would not do: it was only a red herring trailed across the scent.
Next came the cause of morality, which demanded the punishment of offenders. To his consternation he found himself thinking of the affair impersonally, pharisaically, inhumanly, detaching himself from Matilda, thrusting her violently away, giving her a dig or two with the goad of self-righteousness, and swelling at the neck with conscious rectitude. Why? . . . She must suffer for her sins.
Sin?Sünde, pécher.He thought of it in three or four languages, but in all it created an impression of overstatement and, more, of bad taste. He had lived for so long with a warm, intimate idea of Matilda that he resented the intrusion of morality,bidding him stand above her, judge and condemn. It might be simpler, the easiest attitude to adopt—a suit of ready-made mental clothes, reach-me-downs—but it was uncomfortable, cold, and, most astonishing of all, degrading. It was to be impersonal in a desperately personal matter.Ça ne va pas.