Part 13

He knew why she was sparring; he knew that to disappoint a woman in the vanity of her clothes is more immediately dangerous than to treat her with deliberate insult or cruelty, but he was exacerbated by her unfair onslaught on Robert, and he was sore at the attitude taken toward him by his family. Robert had done his best, but the rest were implacable; they would not admit his right to his own actions independent of their opinion. Not content with holding their opinion, they communicated it to him in the most injurious letters, written at intervals most nicely calculated for his annoyance. To a philosopher in search of tolerance and an open mind all this had been ruffling.

The quarrel blew over. Matilda dried away her tears, and he begged her pardon and promised to give her another evening dress finer even than that, made at a real, smart, fashionable, expensive dressmaker's. . . . Shyly and diffidently they entered a famous house in Albemarle Street and were told that without an introduction the firm could not make for madam. A splendid cocotte in glorious raiment swept by them and out into the street. She had a little spaniel in her arms and a silver-gray motorcar was awaiting her. Into this she mounted and was whirled away. With something of both contempt and envy the stately young woman who had received them gazed after this vision of wealth and insolence. Old Mole and Matilda felt very small and crept away.

Old Mole said:

"The wealth of London is amazing. A man would need at least ten thousand a year to amuse himself with a woman like that."

Matilda said:

"A creature like that!"

And a little later she said:

"I think I'll wait for my dress."

However, she had not to wait, for Old Mole gave the story to Robert, who, with a nice sense of the fitness of things, told his sister that he wished to buy a dress for a friend of his, and, armed with her introduction, he and Matilda went and ordered a gown at an establishment even more exclusive than that in Albemarle Street. This establishment was so select that only the most indubitably married or otherwise guaranteed ladies were served; one there obtained the French style without the suspicion of French Frenchness.

The quarrel blew over, but the sensibilities of both were rasped, and they were cautious and wary with one another, which is perhaps the greatest trial of the blessed state of matrimony. He labored to be just to her, to endeavor to understand her. She was, he confessed, in a difficult position, lifted above her kind--though it was inconceivable that she could ever have met the fate or assumed the condition of her sister, Mrs. Boothroyd--and not adopted into his. He was self-outlawed, driven out of the common mind of his class, and, so far as he could see, of his country, into his own, and therein he had as yet discovered no habitation, not even a site whereon to build. She could not share his adventures and sorrows, and, except himself and Robert, had no companionship. He asked her if she had no acquaintance in London, and she confessed to the "second girl," Milly Dufresne. He proposed that she should ask Miss Dufresne to dinner to provide the occasion for the wearing of her new gown. She said she did not suppose he would care for Miss Dufresne, but he protested that her friends were of course his and he was only too delighted that she had a companion of her own sex and age.

The day was fixed (her birthday), the dinner ordered and arranged, a man hired for the evening to do the waiting. Without a word being said, it was assumed that there should be the ceremony due to the necklace and the French (style) gown.

As he considered all these preparations, Old Mole thought amusedly that they were not at all for Miss Dufresne and Robert (who had been invited), but rather a homage paid to their possessions, and, searching within himself for the causes of the comfort and satisfaction he felt, he found that this dinner was the first action which had brought them into harmony with the London atmosphere. Ethically there was nothing to be said for such a pretence at hospitality; but as submission to the æsthetic pressure of their surroundings, as expedience, it was quite wonderfully right. It was the thin end of the wedge, the first turn of the gimlet in the boring of the bunghole of the fat barrel of London existence; and, if it were their fate to become Londoners, they were setting about it with sufficient adroitness. He was only afraid that Miss Dufresne would lead him back into the atmosphere of the theater from which he was so relieved to have escaped. The theater that he had known was only an excrescence on English life, a whelk or a wen on its reputable bald head. He had perched on it like a fly, but his concern, his absorbing concern, was to get at the brains inside that head and the thoughts inside the brain.

On the morning of the day fixed for the dinner Robert wired that he could not come, and Old Mole was left with the awful prospect of tackling Miss Dufresne alone. His recollection of her was of a most admirably typical minx with an appetite for admiration and flattery that had consumed all her other desires.

"Lord save us!" he said. "I was baffled by that type as a young man; what on earth can I do with it in my fifties?"

And in his heart he was fearful of spoiling Matilda's pleasure. This dread so oppressed him that, finding her flurried and irritable with the work of preparation, he decided to absent himself, to lunch at Robert's club, of which he had just been elected a member, and to soothe himself with a walk through Whitehall and the parks in the afternoon.

As he walked--it was a fine spring day with the most beautiful changing lights and a sweet breeze--he congratulated himself on the wisdom of having come to London. Marriage might be difficult--there was no warrant, Scriptural or other, for expecting it to be easy--but at least in London there was interest. There was not the unrelieved sordidness of other English cities. There was a tradition, some attempt to maintain it, graciousness, a kind of dignity--it might be the dignity of a roast sirloin of beef, but dignity it certainly was--here and there traces of manners, and leisure not altogether swamped by luxury. Coming from Thrigsby was like leaving the racket of the factory for the elegant shop in which the finished articles were sold. He liked that simile, and there he left his speculations concerning London. He was not at his ease in this kind of thinking; a thought was only valuable to him when it was successfully married to an emotion to produce an image. For London he could find no image, and when he thought of England he was taken back to his most vivid emotion, that when in the caravan with Copas they had breasted the hill and come in view of the Pennine Range: but this was a mere emotion mated with no thought. As for the Empire, it simply had no significance. It was a misnomer, or rather, a name given to an illusion, or, at best, a generalization. It was certainly not an entity, but only the impossible probability of a universally accepted fiction. He could not accept it, nor could he accept the loose terminology of the politicians. For this reason he could never now read the newspapers except for the cricket and football news in which his interest was maintained by habit.

Less and less was he interested in things and ideas that were not immediately human, and therefore fluid and varying in form and color as clouds and trees in the wind and birds in the air--and human beings on the earth. Rigid theory and fixed conceptions actually hurt him; they were detached, dead, like windfall fruit rotting on the ground, and everywhere, in books, in the newspapers, in public speeches, he saw them gathered up and stored, because it was too much trouble to take the ripe fruit from the tree, or to wait for the hanging fruit to ripen, or because (he thought) men walk with their eyes to the ground, even as he had done, and see nothing of the beauty above and around them. And, thinking so, he would feel an impulse to arise and shout and waken men, but then, regretfully, he would admit that he was too old to surrender to this impulse, and would think too much before he spoke, and would end by prating like Gladstone or roaring like Tom Paine.

It seemed to him that the character of London was changed or changing. He delighted especially in the young men and women, who walked with a new swagger, almost with freedom, and adorned themselves with gay, bold colors. The young women especially were limber in their movements, marvelously adroit in dodging their hampering garments. Their bodies were freer. They had not the tight, trussed appearance of the young women of his own day and generation. He delighted especially in the young women of London. They gave him hopefulness.

He was pleased to see that the young men delighted in them, also. They walked with their arms in the arms of the young women in a fine, warm comradeship, whereas, in his day, and not so long ago neither, the girls had placed a timid little hand in the arms of their swains and been towed along in a sort of condescension. It pleased him to see the young men frankly, and in spite of themselves and their dignity and breeding, give the proper involuntary salute to passing youth and beauty. . . . As he sat in St. James's Park a deliciously pretty girl passed by him, and she repeated nothing of the full homage he paid her, but then came a tall young man, sober and stiff, in silk hat and tail coat. They passed, the young man and the young woman: a lifting of the shoulders in the young man, a tilt of the head in the young woman, a half-smile of pleasure, and they went their ways. The young man approached Old Mole. He gave a little start and up went his hand in the old school salute. Old Mole rose to his feet.

"My dear fellow. . . ."

It was A. Z. Panoukian.

He said:

"Well, sir----"

They sat down together. Panoukian bore the old expression which had always overcast his face when there were discoverable laches in his conduct, and Old Mole felt himself groping for the mood of jocular severity with which he had been wont to meet that expression.

"Well, sir, I never thought----"

Old Mole found the formula:

"Panoukian, what have you been up to?"

"Well, sir, I'm jolly glad to have met you, because I didn't know what you might have heard."

"Pray, Panoukian, forget that I was ever your schoolmaster. I am no longer an academic person, though there are distressing traces of my old profession in my outlook."

Panoukian had heard the story, and a grin spread across his face. That made things easier. He plumped out a full confession and personal history.

He had been a rank failure at Oxford. He had no one but himself to blame, of course. Perhaps he had not given the place a fair trial, but at the end of his fourth term he had decided that it was no use going on, and removed himself. It was partly, he thought, that he could not endure Tibster, and partly that he had lost all power of concentrating on his work.

"I don't know," he said, "but at school there was always something to work for, to get to Oxford. When I got there I seemed to shoot ahead of it, to see beyond it, and in the place itself I could find nothing but Tibster and the Tibsterian mind, cut off from the world outside and annoyed because that world has a voluptuousness which is not in its own little box. I think I changed physically, grew a new kidney or another lobe of the brain. Anyhow, the world shrank and I became very large and unwieldy, and there was nothing positive in my existence except my dislike of Tibster."

"Did you smoke a great deal?" asked Old Mole.

"Only after the crisis."

"Did you make a verse translation of the Odyssey?"

"Only the first four books."

"I imagine, if you had taken your symptoms to Tibster, he would have put you right. The university has that effect on sensitive undergraduates, especially on non-Public School men. A sudden growth, a swift shooting from boyhood into the beginnings of manhood. It is very touching to watch; but Tibster must have seen it happen so often that it would be difficult for him to notice that it was happening to you more violently than usual."

"I never thought of it from Tibster's point of view."

"My dear Panoukian, I am only just beginning to see your affairs from your point of view, or, indeed, to admit that you have a point of view at all. . . . I hope it was not a great disappointment to your father."

Panoukian said his father had died during his second term. He had been attached to his father and was with him at the end, and perhaps that was what began the crisis. The business had gone to his brothers, but he was left enough to live on, and that was how he came to be in London. For the time being he was acting as secretary, unpaid, to Tyler Harbottle, M. P. for North Thrigsby and an old friend of his father's. Old Mole remembered Harbottle, a butter merchant in Thrigsby and president of the Literary Society, the Field Society, the Linnæan Society, the Darwin Club, the Old Fogies, and the Ancient Codgers, and formerly a member of the Art Gallery Committee, and, in that capacity, provocative of the outcry on the purchase of a picture by so advanced and startling a painter as Puvis de Chavannes. He asked Panoukian how he liked the House of Commons, and Panoukian said it was full of Tibsters with soap and chemicals and money on their brains instead of Greek and Latin and book philosophy.

"Harbottle is a Tibster, with a little nibbling mind, picking here and there, not because he is hungry, but because he is afraid some one else will get the pieces if he doesn't. I went to him because I wanted to work; but it isn't work, it's just getting in other people's way. And there are swarms of Harbottles in the House. I sometimes think that the whole of politics is nothing but Harbottling. It would be all very well to have the brake hard on if the country were going to Hell, but when it is a matter of a long, stiff hill it is heartrending."

And with a magnificent gesture he swept all the Tibsters and Harbottles away. Old Mole found his enthusiastic, sweeping condemnation very refreshing. There was youth in it, and he was beginning to value youth above all things. Above wisdom and experience? At least above the caution of inexperience.

Clearly Panoukian was prepared to go on talking, to leave Harbottle to go on nibbling without his aid, but Old Mole had begun to feel a chill, and rose to go. Panoukian was also going toward the India Office--Harbottle was corresponding with the Secretary about two Parsees who had been refused their right of appeal to the Privy Council--and so far they went together. As they parted Old Mole remembered Matilda's dinner party and Miss Dufresne. Panoukian seemed an excellent buffer. He invited him, and from the eagerness with which the invitation was accepted he surmised that Panoukian was rather lonely in London. Then he felt glad that he had asked him.

The party was very successful. Matilda was delighted to have another male, and that a young one, to admire her fine feathers, and Panoukian was obviously flattered and deliciously alarmed to meet a real live actress who confirmed him in his superstitious notions of the morals of the stage by flirting with him at sight. He was not very skilful in his response, but a very little subjugation was enough to satisfy Miss Dufresne: she only needed to know that she could an she would. He was very shy, and, with him, shyness ran to talkativeness. With Matilda he was like a schoolboy; his attitude toward her was a softening and rounding with chivalry of his attitude toward Old Mole. He hardly ever spoke to her without calling her Mrs. Beenham: "Yes, Mrs. Beenham"--"Don't you think so, Mrs. Beenham?"--"As I was saying to your husband, Mrs. Beenham. . . ." When he left he summoned up courage to ask Old Mole if he would bring Mrs. Beenham to tea with him. He lived in the Temple and had a wonderful view of St. Paul's and the river. Old Mole promised he would do so, and asked him to come in whenever he liked.

"It's awfully good of you," said Panoukian, and with that he went off with Miss Dufresne, who had engaged him to see her into a taxi. Matilda stood at the head of the stairs and watched them go down.

"Good night, dearie," called Miss Dufresne, and Panoukian, looking up, saw Matilda bending over.

"Good night, Mrs. Beenham," he cried.

Matilda, returning to the study, said:

"What a nice voice that boy has got."

"I used to expect great things of Panoukian," said Old Mole, "but then neither he nor I had seen beyond Oxford."

"Is he very clever?"

"He used to have the sort of cleverness schoolmasters like. It remains to be seen whether he has the sort of cleverness the world needs. He is very young."

"Not so _very_ young."

"Like your party?"

"Oh, yes."

"You looked very pretty."

"Thank you, sir."

"Good girl. What about bed?"

But she was loth to move. She began several topics, but soon dropped them. At last she plunged:

"Millie's going into a new piece. It's a real play this time. It's about the stage and there are to be a lot of chorus girls in it. She says she could get me in easily."

Old Mole took this in silence.

"I won't go if you don't like it," she said.

"Have you said you would go?"

"Yes, yes."

"Do you want to?"

"What else is there for me to do?"

Indeed, what was there? He was saddened and angry at the use of the argument. He had wanted her to feel free, to come and to go, so long only as she treated him with frankness, and here he had so far failed that she had made arrangements to return to the theater and then asked for his _post facto_ consent. What was it that kept her in awe of him? Not his thoughts of her, nor his feeling for her, so far as he knew either. . . . He kissed her good night and sat sadly brooding over it all: but it was too difficult for him, and he was tired and his humor would not come to his aid. He sought refuge in books, but they yielded him none, and at last Panoukian's phrase recurred to him:

"Perhaps," he said, "perhaps I am a Harbottler in marriage, nibbling at love. God help me if I am."

He thought surely he had reached the worst. But Fate is inexhaustibly ingenious. He was to have his bellyful of Harbottling.

Among his letters on the morning after the party he found one, the envelope of which bore in print the name of Langley Brown, Literary and Dramatic Agent, 9 Coventry Street, W. This letter informed him that Mr. Henry Butcher, of the Pall Mall Theater, proposed to immediately produce--(the split infinitive is Mr. Langley Brown's)--a play called "Lossie Loses," by Carlton Timmis, the rights of which Mr. Brown believe to be in Mr. Beenham's hands. And would Mr. Beenham call on Mr. Brown, or, if not, write to give his consent, when the contract would be drawn up and the play produced.

He had almost forgotten Carlton Timmis. The letter had been forwarded through his banker. He stared at it, turned it over and over, read it again. It seemed to be an authentic document. He handed it to Matilda. She said with awe:

"Mr. Butcher!"

And, with unconscious imitation of the humor of the English Bench, Old Mole asked:

"Who is Mr. Butcher?"

This was shocking ignorance. For twenty years and more Mr. Henry Butcher's name had been in the newspapers, on the hoardings, and his portrait, his wife's portrait, his baby's portrait, his dog's portrait, his horse's portrait had appeared in the magazines, and his commendation of a certain brand of cigarette had for the last ten years been used by the makers as an advertisement. For all that, his name and personality had not penetrated Old Mole's consciousness.

"Did you buy the play?" asked Matilda.

"I lent him fifty pounds, and he left it with me. I had no very clear idea as to his intention."

"Is it a good play?"

"You shall read it."

He unearthed it with some difficulty and gave it to her. She read it and wept over it.

"Is it a good play?" he asked.

"I don't know, but it's a lovely part."

He went to see Mr. Brown, a flashy little Cockney who peppered him with illustrious literary names and talked about everything but the business in hand. Old Mole asked where Timmis might be, and Mr. Brown said he had heard from him only once, and that from a place called Crown Imperial, in British Columbia.

"A good fellow, Timmis, but cracked. Impatient, you know. I never can make young writers see that they've got to wait until the old birds drop off the perch before their masterpieces can come home to roost."

"Is 'Lossie Loses' a masterpiece?" asked Old Mole innocently.

"Between ourselves," replied the agent, "I don't think there's much in it. But Mr. Butcher has been having a lean period lately and wanted something cheap, and thought he'd try a new author."

He produced the contract. Old Mole read it through in a sort of dream and signed it. He was shown out with a hearty handshake, and that very evening he received from Mr. Brown a check for ninety pounds--a hundred in advance of royalties less 10 per cent. commission. He was disconcerted. There was some uncanny wizardry in it that, by merely walking into an office and signing a paper, one could at the end of the day be the richer by ninety pounds with never a stroke of work done for it. His first impulse was to give the check to Matilda, but, on reflection, he decided to give her forty and to keep the fifty for Timmis if he could be found. He looked up Crown Imperial, British Columbia, on the map and in the gazetteer, but there was no mention of it, and, concluding that it must be a new place, he wrote to Timmis there in the hope of catching him. When he had posted his letter he remembered that Timmis might have dropped his stage name, and wrote another letter to Cuthbert Jones. Then he brushed the play from his mind.

Within a fortnight it was impossible to walk along any of the main thoroughfares of London without seeing the words "Lossie Loses," with the name of Mr. Henry Butcher in enormous letters, and the name of Carlton Timmis in very small print.

For the first night Old Mole received, with Mr. Butcher's compliments, a ticket for Box B. Panoukian and Robert came to dinner. Matilda wore her first evening dress and the opera cloak, a red ribbon in her hair, and graced the front of the box with the three men behind her.

There is a certain manner appropriate to a seat in the front of a box--a consciousness that is not quite self-consciousness, a certain setting back of the shoulders, a lifting of the head, a sort of shy brazenness, an acceptance of being part of the show, and, for all the pit knows, a duchess. Matilda had caught it to perfection and turned a dignified profile to the opera glasses directed upon her. Panoukian pointed out the political personages in the stalls, and, being a great reader of those glossy photographic papers, which are perhaps the most typical product of the time, was able to recognize many of the literary and artistic celebrities of the moment. Actresses glided fussily to their seats, smiling acknowledgment to the applause of the groundlings. There was a bobbing up and down, a bowing and a smiling, a waving of programs and fans from acquaintance to acquaintance, a chatter and hum of many voices that drowned the jigging overture, and went droning on into the first few moments of the play.