Part 11

His was a very pleasant mood to drift in and lounge and taste the soothing savor of irony, which dulls sharp edges and tempers the emphasis of optimism or pessimism. It seems to deliver the soul from its desire for relief and sops its hunger with a comfortable pity. But it is a lie. Old Mole knew it not for what it was and hugged it to himself, and called it wisdom, and he began to write a satire on education as he had known it in Thrigsby. He reveled in the physical labor of writing, in the company of his ideas as they took shape in the furnace of concentration, and what he had intended to be a short pamphlet grew into an elaborate account of his twenty-five years of respectable and respected service, showing the slow submergence of the human being into the machine evolved for the creation of other machines. . . . He was weeks and months over it. The tour did not come to an end as had been anticipated, but was continued through the holiday months at the seaside resorts. They returned to Blackpool in August, and then he finished his work and read it to Edwin Watts. The musician had an enormous reverence for the printed word, and had never met an author before. His emotionalism warmed up and colored the dryness and bitterness of Old Mole's tale, and he saw in it only a picture of suppression and starved imagination like his own. He applauded, and Old Mole was proud of his firstborn and determined to publish it. In his early days he had revised and prepared a book of Examination Papers in Latin accidence for a series, and to the publisher he sent his "Syntax and Sympathy." It had really moved Edwin Watts, and he composed in its honor a sonata in B flat, which he dedicated "To the mute, inglorious Miltons of Lancashire." It was played on the pier by a municipal band, but did not immediately produce any ebullition of genius.

When Old Mole told Matilda that he had written a book she asked:

"Is it a story?"

"A sort of story."

"Has it a happy ending? I can't see why people write stories that make you miserable."

"It's a wonderful book," said Edwin Watts.

And Old Mole said:

"I flatter myself there are worse books written."

When Watts had gone Matilda said:

"If it's not a nice book I couldn't bear it."

"What do you mean--you couldn't bear it?"

"If it's like that Lucretius you're so fond of I'd be ashamed."

In the intoxication that still endured from the fumes of writing he had been thinking that the book was not incomparable with "De Rerum Natura," something between that and the Satires of Juvenal.

In a few weeks his manuscript returned with a polite letter from the publisher declining it, desiring to see more of Mr. Beenham's work, and enclosing his reader's report. It was short:

" 'Syntax and Sympathy' is satire without passion or any basis of love for humanity. There is nothing more damnable. The book is clever enough. It would be beastly in French--there is a plentiful crop of them in Paris; in England, thank God, with our public's loathing of cleverness, it is impossible."

The author burned letter and report, and at night, when Matilda was at the theater, buried the manuscript in the sands.

If there be any man who, awaking from a moral crisis, finds himself withered by the fever of it and racked with doubt as to his power to go boldly and warmly among his fellowmen without being battered and bewildered into pride or priggishness or cold egoism or thin-blooded humanitarianism, let him go to Blackpool in holiday time. There he will find hundreds of thousands of men, women and children; he will hear them, see them, smell them, be jostled and chaffed by them. He will find them in and on the water, on the sands, in the streets, in the many public places, shows and booths, in the vast ballrooms, straggling and stravading, smoking, drinking, laughing, guffawing, cracking coarse jokes, singing bawdy and patriotic songs with equal gusto, making music with mouth-organs, concertinas, cornets; young men and maidens kissing and squeezing unashamed, and at night stealing out to the lonely sands; old men and women gurgling over beer and tobacco, yarning over the troubles that came of just such lovemaking in their young days; and all hot and perspiring; wearing out their bodies, for once in a way, in pleasure, gross pleasure with no savor to it nor lasting quality, but coarse as the food they eat, as the beds they lie on, as the clothes they wear; forgetting that their bodies are, day in, day out, bent in labor, forgetting the pinch and penury of their lives at home, forgetting that their bodies have any other than their brutish functions of eating, drinking, sleeping, excretion and fornication. . . . Old Mole watched it all, and, true to his ironical mood, he saw the mass in little, swarming like ants; in the early morning of the great day these creatures were belched forth from the black internal regions of the country, out upon the seashore; there they sprawled and struggled and made a great clatter and din, until at the end of the day they were sucked back again. Intellectually it interested him. It was a pageant of energy unharnessed; but it was all loose, unshaped, overdone, repeating itself again and again, so that at last it destroyed any feeling he might have had for it. He saw it through to the end, to the last excursion train going off, crammed in every compartment, with tired voices singing, often quite beautifully, in harmony.

Matilda had refused to go out with him. She came home very late from the theater, and said she had been helping the knitting woman cut out some clothes. He asked her if she had ever seen the crowds in the pleasure city. She looked away from him, and with a sudden, almost imperceptible, gesture of pain replied:

"Once."

He knew when that was, and with a tearing agony the old jealousy rushed in upon him and with a brutality that horrified him, that was whipped out of him, to the ruin of his self-control, he ground out:

"Yes. I know when that was."

Her hand went tugging up to her breast and she said with passionate resentment:

"You ought never to say a thing like that to me."

His blood boiled into a fury and he turned on her, but she was gone. He wrestled with himself, toiled and labored to regain his will, the mastery of his thoughts and his feelings. The jealousy died away, but no other emotion came to take its place. He regained his will, saw clearly again, but was more possessed by his irony than before. He was no longer its master, no longer drifting comfortably, but its slave, whirled hither and thither at its caprice--and it was like a hot gusty wind blowing in him before a storm. All the color of the world was heavy and metallic, but it was painted color, a painted world. He was detached from himself, from Matilda, and he and she passed into the puppet show in the miserable liberty of the gaily painted dolls: free only in being out of the crowd, sharing none of the crowd's energy, having no part in any solidarity.

He made himself a bed on the hard horsehair sofa in their room and lay hour by hour staring at the window panes, listening to the distant thud and thunder of the sea, watching for the light to come to make plain the window and show up the colors of the painted world.

In the morning they avoided each other, and she spent the day with the knitting woman, he with Edwin Watts, and, when, at night, she returned from the theater, he was asleep. It was the first time they had strangled a day, and it lay cold and dark between them. He admitted perfectly that he was at fault, but to say that he was sorry was a mockery and an untruth. He was not sorry, for he felt nothing.

They bore the burden of their sullen acquiescence in silence into the third day, and then she said:

"If you want me to go, I'll go."

"No! No! I'll go."

Silence had been torture, but speech was racking. They were at the mercy of words, and there was an awful finality about the word _go_ which neither desired and yet neither could qualify. . . . Plainly she had been weeping, but that exasperated him. She, at any rate, had found an outlet, and he had discovered none. And all the time he was haunted by the futility, the childishness of it all.

"Where will you go?" she asked.

"Does it matter?"

"I suppose not. But some one must look after you."

He muttered unintelligibly.

Was he--was he coming back? Of course he was. He would let her know.

He went to Paris and stayed in his old hotel in the Rue Daunou. The exhilaration of the journey, the spirit of amusement that is in the air of the city of light, buoyed him up for a couple of days. He dined skillfully and procured the glow of satisfaction of a bottle of fine wine, sought crowds and the curious company of the boulevards, but as soon as he was alone again his inflation collapsed and he took pen, paper and thick paintlike ink and wrote his first letter to her. He began "my love," crossed that out and substituted "my dearest," tore up the sheet of paper and began "my dear." He pondered this for a long time and wrote his initials and circles and squares on the paper, as it dawned on him that for the first time for nearly thirty years--well over twenty, at any rate--he was writing a love letter, that it had to be written, and that the last series upon which he had embarked was no sort of model for this. He chewed the ends and ragged threads of folly of his twenties and was astonished at the small amount of truth and genuine affection he could find in them, wondered, too, what had become of the waters of the once so easily tapped spring of ardor and affection. It seemed to him that he could mark the very moment of its subterranean plunge. It had been, had it not, when he had made his fruitless effort to escape from Thrigsby, when he had applied--in vain--for the Australian professorship. Then he had shut and locked the door upon himself, and he remembered clearly the day, at the beginning of term, when he had, with glowing excitement and a sort of tragical humor, saluted his Form Room as his lasting habitation. . . . Once more he scratched H. J. B. on the paper before him, but saw it not, for clearly in his mind was the vision of Matilda, lying in her bed with her hair thrown back over her pillow and her hand beneath her cheek, and the whiteness of her throat and the slenderness of her arms, the scent of her hair. . . . His heart was full again. He took another sheet of paper, and, with no picking of phrases, he wrote:

"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 would suffer 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 damnable tunes 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 an unkind 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 as smaller 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 to London 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 good things 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.