Part 12

In the thick of it Old Mole, to satisfy himself, walked over to that town which is advertised as the Queen of Watering Places. There were thousands of the middle classes on the sands. Their children were sprawling on sand castles and dabbling in the thin washings of the sea. Fathers and mothers were lounging in deck chairs, sleeping under handkerchiefs and hats and umbrellas; grandmothers were squatting in charge of their grandchildren. Some of them were reading about the strike in the newspapers. At teatime the beach was cleared as though all human beings had been blown from it by a sea breeze. An hour later it was thickly thronged and the pierrots in their little open-air theater were playing to an enormous audience. The strike had prolonged their holiday; they were prepared to go on in its monotony instead of in the monotony of their work and domestic life. They were quite contented, dully acceptant. There were no trains? Very well, then; they would wait until there were trains. Respectable, well-behaved, orderly, genteel people do not starve. . . . And they were right.

However, it set Old Mole thinking about his own means, the independence which he owed to no virtue nor talent, nor thrift of his own, but to a system which he did not understand, to sources which in the intricacies of their journey to himself were impossible to follow. Of the many enterprises all over the world, in the profits of which he had his share, he knew nothing at all. The reports that were sent to him were too boring or too technical to read. The postman and the fish buyer assured him that he was living upon the underpaid and overtaxed labors of thousands of unhappy men and women. He had no reason for disbelieving them, but, on the whole, his sympathies were with the middle-classes, his attitude theirs; that respectable, well-behaved, orderly, genteel people do not starve. Not that he classed himself with them; he disliked the memory of his colleagues at Thrigsby, of the men at the golf club at Bigley more than anything, and at this time he was not moderate in his dislikes. He warmed to the enthusiasm of the Socialists, but was exasperated by the manner in which, after having made a clean sweep of everything except themselves and their kind, they could produce no constructive idea, but only a thin cerebral fluid, done up in different colored bottles as in a pharmacy. Just at the point when he found himself beginning to dream of a world of decent, kindly, human beings delivered (as far as possible) from their own folly and the tyrannies bred from it, they left humanity altogether and gloated hectically over their "questions."

If that were Socialism, he would have none of it; he preferred money. He told them so, and found that he had uttered the most appalling blasphemy. They said that Socialism was a religion, the religion that would save the world.

Said Old Mole:

"There have been Hebraism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Christianity, the worship of Isis and Osiris, the worship of the Bull, the Cat, the Snake, the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the Phallus; there have been prophets without number and martyrs more than I can say, saints for every day in the year and more, and none of them has saved the world. More than that, I will go so far as to say that none of them has done as much to raise the standard of living as money."

"Damn it all," said the fish buyer, "I'm not talking about superstitions. I'm talking about ideas."

"Money also is an idea," replied Old Mole, "and it is as generally misunderstood as any other."

He was beginning to be rather excited, for he felt that he was getting the better of the argument, and would not allow himself to see that he had floundered on to the debater's trick of shunting his opponents on to unfamiliar country. They had gone up and down one stretch of line, between two points--capitalism and labor--for so long, without looking on either side of them, that it needed only a very slight adjustment or transposition of terms to reduce them to a beating of the void. They clung to their point, and the postman at last said triumphantly:

"But money isn't a religion; Socialism is--the religion, the only religion of the working classes of this country. They've had enough of the next world; they want a bit o' this for a change."

"So do I," returned Old Mole, "all of it. I say that money is an idea, perhaps the only practicable idea in the world at present. It isn't a religious idea simply because men as a whole are not religious. It has the advantage over your Socialism that it is a part of life as it is, while your religion, as you call it, is only a straining after the future life, an edifice without a foundation, for to bring about its realization you have to hew and cut and shape human nature to fit into the conditions of your fantasy. If I wanted to be a prophet, which I don't--I should base my vision on money. There would be some chance then of everybody understanding it and really taking it into his life. If you could make money a religious idea--that is, make money a thing which men would respect and revere and abuse as little as possible--you would very likely produce something--deeds, not words and questions."

"Don't you call the strike 'doing something'?" cried the fish buyer.

"We shall see," replied Old Mole.

The postman filled his cutty and laughed:

"Don't you see," he said to the fish buyer, "that he is pulling your leg?"

So, convinced of their superiority, they abandoned the discussion.

His tussles with these Jeremiahs of the Yorkshire village gave Old Mole the confidence he needed, and the exultant glow of a sharpening of the wits, which are like razors, most apt to cut the wielder of them when they are most dull. He tortured himself no more with his failure to satisfy Matilda, but laid all his hopes in the future and the amusing life in London that he wished to create for her. Intensely he desired her to develop her own life, to grow into the splendid creature he now saw struggling beneath the crust of ignorance and prejudice and shyness and immaturity that hemmed her in. There was such beauty in her, and he had failed to make it his, a part of himself, and in his blundering efforts to teach her, to lead her on to the realization and gift of herself, he had wounded her even when he most adored her. . . . The dead woman, Enid, had been more to her than he had ever been. He saw that now. She had known in that woman's lift something that was not in her own, and she desired it; how much it was painful to see. She never looked for it in him, but gazed in upon herself in a sort of pregnancy of the soul. And, like a pregnant woman, she must be satisfied in her whimsies, she must have her desires anticipated, she must be given the color and brightness of life, now before her sensitiveness had passed away for want of fair impressions. These she had been denied in the young years of her life. She must have them. . . . She must have them. . . .

She accepted his proposal to go to London without enthusiasm. She thought over it for some time and at last she said:

"Yes. It will be best for you. I don't want you to go away again."

And the night before they left, when the train-service was restored, she took out the necklace as she was undressing and tried it on, and looked at herself in the mirror and said:

"I'd like to wear this in London. But I shall want an evening dress, sha'n't I?"

She smiled at him. His heart overflowed and colored the workings of his mind with a full humor. He thought:

"If there be ideas, how better can they be expressed than in terms of Matilda?"

V

IN THE SWIM

_Whoever has an ambition to be heard in a crowd must press, and squeeze, and thrust, and climb, with indefatigable pains, till he has exalted himself to a certain degree of altitude above them._

A TALE OF A TUB

V

IN THE SWIM

THEY stayed at first in one of the hotels designed to give provincials bed and breakfast for five shillings, for visitors to London do not mind in how much they are mulcted in pursuit of pleasure, but resent the payment of an extra farthing for necessaries. They were high up on the fifth floor and could see right over many roofs and chimneys to the dome of St. Paul's. They saw the sights and lunched and dined in restaurants, and went by river to Greenwich, by tram to Kew, and Old Mole was forced to admit that it is possible to fall short of a philosophic conception of happiness and yet to have a very amusing time. It was Matilda's ambition to go to every theater in London. She found it possible to enjoy everything, and therefore he was not bored.

Sheer physical exhaustion brought their pleasure-seeking to an end, and they set about finding a habitation. On their arrival Old Mole had written to his brother, but had had no reply. At last a scrubby clerk arrived with a note:

"So glad you have come to your senses. Come to lunch, 1.15.--R. B."

They went to lunch in Gray's Inn, and after so much frequenting of public places it was deliciously peaceful to sink into private armchairs among personal belongings and a goodly company of books. Robert was very genial and kissed Matilda and delivered her over to his laundress for the inevitable feminine preparations for a meal. While she was away he told Old Mole that he had taken silk, and was retiring from the Bar, and building himself a house at Sunningdale, for the links, and was looking out for a suitable tenant. If Old Mole liked to keep a room for him he could have the place practically as it stood, on a two-thirds sharing basis. . . . It were hard to find, in London, a pleasanter place. The windows looked out onto the rookery, the rooms were of beautiful design and proportion, and there were eight of them altogether distributed over two floors, communicating by a charming oak-balustraded staircase.

"I've lived here for thirty years," said Robert, "and I'd like it kept in the family."

Old Mole was delighted. It saved all the vexation and discomfort of finding and furnishing a house, and here, ready-made, was the atmosphere of culture and comfort he was seeking and inwardly designing for the blossoming of Matilda.

Robert beamed on her when she came in, and said:

"We've made a plan."

She was properly excited.

"Yes. You're going to live here."

"Here? . . . Oh!" And she looked about among the pictures and the old furniture and the rich curtains and hangings, and timidly, shyly, as though she were not certain how they would take it, adopted them.

They made her sit at the head of the table and placed themselves on either side of her, and, as Robert poured her out a glass of wine (Berncastler Doktor), he said:

"You know, the old place has always wanted this."

"Wanted--what?" asked Matilda. "I think it's perfect."

"A charming hostess," said Robert, with an elaborate little bow of courtliness.

A fortnight later saw Robert installed at Sunningdale and the Beenhams in occupation of his chambers. They shared only the dining-room; Old Mole had the upstairs rooms and Matilda those downstairs. It was his arrangement, and came from reaction against the closeness in which they had lived during the long pilgrimage from lodging to lodging.

Once a fortnight Robert engaged Old Mole to play golf with him, and he consented because he desired to give Matilda as full a liberty as she could desire. In the alternate weeks Robert came to stay for two nights and occupied his room next to Old Mole's. He would take them out to dinner and the theater, and after it the brothers would sit up yarning until the small hours, and always the discussion would begin by Robert saying:

" 'Pon my honor, women are extraordinary!" And then, completely to his own satisfaction, he would produce those generalizations which, in England, pass for a knowledge of human nature, and Old Mole would recognize them as old companions of his own. They were too absurd for anger, but Robert's persistence would annoy him, and he would say:

"When you live with a woman you are continually astonished to find that she is a human being."

"Human," answered Robert, sweetening the sentiment with a sip of port, "with something of the angel."

"Angel be damned," came in explosive protest, "women are just as human as ourselves, and rather more so."

"Ah!" said Robert, with blissful inconsequence, "but it doesn't do to let 'em know it."

Robert's contemptuous sentimentalization of women so bothered Old Mole that he sought to probe for its sources. Among the books in the chambers were many modern English novels, and he found nearly all of them, in varying formulæ, dealing axiomatically with woman as an extraneous animal unaccountably attached to the species, a creature fearfully and wonderfully ignorant of the affairs of the world, of her own physical processes, of the most elementary rules of health, morality, and social existence, capricious, soulless, unscrupulous, scheming, intriguing, concerned wholly and solely with marriage, if she were a "good" woman, with the destruction of marriage if she were "bad"; at best being a sort of fairy--(Robert's "angel")--whose function and destiny were to pop the sugarplum of love into the mouths of virtuous men. The most extreme variant of this conception was to be found in the works of Robert Wherry, who, in a syrupy medium, depicted women as virginal mothers controlling and comforting a world of conceited, helpless little boys. Wherry was enormously successful, and he had many imitators, but none of them had his supreme audacity or his canny belief in the falsehood which was his only stock in trade. The trait of Wherry was upon all the novels in Robert's collection. Even among the "advanced" novels the marks of the beast were there. They advanced not by considering life, but by protest against Wherry. They said, in effect, "Woman is not a mother, she is a huntress of men, or a social worker, or a mistress--(the conscious audacity in using that word!)--or a parasite, or a tyrant"; and one bold fellow said, "She has breasts"; he said it not once, but on every fifth page in every book. Old Mole found him even more disgusting than Wherry, who at least, in his dexterity, might be supposed to give pleasure to young girls and foolish, inexperienced persons of middle age--(like Robert)--and no great harm be done.

To protect himself against the uncleanness of these books he took down "Rabelais," which Robert kept tucked away on his highest shelf. And when he had driven off the torpor in his blood and thoughts induced by the slavishness of Robert's modern literature, he told himself that it was folly to take it seriously:

"There have always been bad books," he said. "The good survive in the love of good readers. Good taste is always the same, but vicious taste is blown away by the cleansing winds of the soul."

All the same, he could not so easily away with modern literature, for he was suffering from the itch to write, and had already half-planned, being, like every one else, subject to the moral disease of the time, an essay on Woman. Wherry and the rest brought him up sharp: they made him very angry, but they made him perceive in himself many of the distressing symptoms he had found in them. He gave more thought to them, and, though he knew nothing of how these books were written, or of the conditions under which literature was at that time produced and marketed, he came to see these men and women as mountebanks in a fair, each shouting outside a little tent. "Come inside and see what Woman is like." And some showed bundles of clothes, with nobody inside them; and some showed life-size dolls; and some showed women nude to the waist; and some showed women with bared legs; and some showed women in pink fleshings; and some showed naked women who had lost their modesty, and therefore could not be gazed upon without offence.

He pondered his own essay, and recognized that its subject was not Woman, but Matilda. In that gallery he could not show her, nor could he, without shame, display her to the public view. And therein, it seemed to him, he had touched the secret of all these lewd exhibitions. The displayers of them, in their impatient haste to catch the pennies of the public, or admiration, or whatever they might be desiring, were presenting, raw, confused and unimagined, their own unfelt and uncogitated experience, or, sometimes, an extension of their experience, in which, by an appalling logic, while they limned life as they would like to live it, they were led to the limits of unreason and egoistic folly. In presentation or extension, only those shows had any compelling force in which egoism was complete and entire lack of feeling relieved the showmen of fine scruples or human decency. Where shreds of decency were left they only served to show up the horrible obscenity of the rest.

Looking at it in this light--and there seemed no other way of correlating this literature with human life--Old Mole was distressed.

"It is bad enough," he thought, "when they make a public show of their emotions, but when they parade emotions they never had, that is the abomination of desolation."

Matilda read some of them. She gulped them down at the rate of two in an evening, but when he tried to discuss them with her she had nothing to say about them. To her they were just stories, to be read and forgotten. He tried to persuade himself that she was right, at any rate more sensible than himself, but could get no further than the admission of the fact that she had no feeling for literature and would just as soon read a cash-made piece of hackwork as a masterpiece. That led him back to the subject of his essay and woman's indifference to ideas and idealism. He had been considering it as a general proposition, but he was forced to admit that it was in truth only Matilda's indifference to his own ideas, and he was not at all sure but she possessed something much more valuable, a power to assimilate ideas when they had taken flesh and become a part of the life that is lived. He knew that he was using her as a test, a touchstone, and through her he had learned to tolerate many things which his reason scouted. As a practical criterion for life and living (two very different things, as he was beginning dimly to perceive)--she was very valuable to him, but it was when he passed on to the things of art and found himself faced with the need of getting or begetting clear conceptions of phenomena, in his search for the underlying, connecting and resolving truth, that she failed him. She said he thought too much. Perhaps he did, but it was a part of his way of living, and he could not rest content with his relation with her, except he had also his idea of her. It was a relief to him, and he felt he was greatly advanced along the road by which he was traveling when he found her in the National Gallery among the five singing women of the _Nativity_ of Piero della Francesca. That discovery gave her an existence in the world of art. He told her about the picture and took her to see it.

"Good Lord!" she said. "Is that what you think I'm like?"

She had thrilled to London. She used to say she would like to go back into the provinces just to have again the pleasure of arriving at the station and coming out into the roar of the traffic and the wonderful London smell. The shops had bowled her over. Cities she had known where there was one street of elegant shops, towns where there might be one shop whose elegance lifted it high above all the rest, but here there were miles and miles of them. She discovered them for herself, and then took her husband to see the magical region of Oxford Street and Regent Street. In Bond Street they saw a necklace just like hers, and a most elegant young man went into the shop and the necklace was taken out of the window. She saw hats and coats and tailor-mades that she bought "in her mind," as she said, for she was still scared of money, and he could not induce her to be anything but frugal. (She would walk a mile to save a penny bus fare.) . . . When they went into Gray's Inn and Robert removed his curtains and some of his furniture, she asked if she might buy some of her things herself, and they visited the great stores. She quickly lost her awe of them, and when she had drawn two or three checks for amounts staggering to her who had lived all her life cooped in by a weekly financial crisis, she applied her mind to the problem, and did many little sums on scraps of paper to reassure herself that she had not shaken the bank's faith in her stability and honesty. It ceased to be a miracle to her, but she hated drawing checks to herself, for cash vanished so easily and unaccountably, while for checks made payable to tradespeople she always had something to show. In this state of mind she decided, and, as something momentous, announced her decision to buy an evening dress. It was no light undertaking. A week passed before she found the material, and when she had bought it--(for in her world you always had dresses "made up")--she was doubtful of her taste, and as dubious of Old Mole's. She bought the _Era_ and looked up the address of the second girl in the pantomime, who remained to her the smartest woman of her acquaintance. Curiosity as to the address in Gray's Inn brought the "second girl" flying to her aid; she was delighted to be of use and undertook to show Matilda the ins and outs of the shops and "the dear old West End." She gave counsel as to trimming, knew of an admirable dressmaker near Hanover Square, "ever so cheap." The dressmaker also sold hats, and Matilda bought hats for herself and her friend. The dressmaker also sold opera cloaks, and Matilda bought an opera cloak. The dress and the cloak necessitated, enforced, finer stockings, shoes, gloves than any Matilda possessed, and these also she purchased. . . . When all these acquisitions came home she laid them out on her bed and gazed at them in alarm and pleasure. It was the middle of the afternoon, but she changed every stitch of her clothing and donned everything new, the dress and the opera cloak, the necklace, and, as she had seen the ladies do in the theater, she wore a ribbon through her hair. In this guise Old Mole surprised her. He was ravished by her loveliness, but was so taken aback by all these secret doings, so tickled by her simplicity, that he laughed. He laughed indulgently, but he sapped her confidence, reduced all her pleasure to ashes, and there were tears, and she wished she had never come to London, and she knew she was not good enough for him, but he need not so plainly tell her so nor scorn her when she tried to make herself so: other women had pretty clothes, women, too, who were hard put to it to make a living.

He soothed her and said if she would wear her silks and fine array he would take her out next time Robert came.

"I don't want to go out with Robert."

"Why not?"

"If I'm not good enough to know your sister, I'm not good enough to know your brother."

"That isn't reasonable."

She was ruffled and hot, and in her heart annoyed with him for coming in on her like that, for she had planned to take him by surprise on their first evening's pleasuring. She did not want to be soothed, and preferred sparring.

"Your sister's in town, isn't she?"

"Yes."

"Have you seen her?"

"No."

"You have."

"I have not."