Part 14

Old Mole's memory of it was hazy, but sufficiently alive to quarrel with some of the impressions he now had of it and to enable him to distinguish between the work of the actors and the work of the author. The play was worse and better than he had thought. In his recollection it was not so entirely unscrupulous in its appeal to the surface emotions, nor so extraordinarily adroit in sliding off into a dry, sly and perfectly irrelevant humor just at the moment when those base appeals looked as though they were going to be pushed so far as to offend even the thickest sensibilities. Each curtain was brought down with a neat, wistful little joke, except at the end of the third act, when, in silence, Lossie, the little unloved heroine of the play, prepared to cook the supper for the husband who had just left her. In the fourth act he came back and ate it, so that all ended happily. The atmosphere was Lancashire, and the actors spoke Scots, Irish, Belfast, Somerset, and Wigan, but that did not seem to matter. The actress who played Lossie spoke with a very good Thrigsby accent, and her performance was full of charm. She had a fine voice and knew how to use it, and her awkwardness of gesture suited the uncouthness with which the Lancashire folk were endowed. She and the sad little jokes carried all before them, and there was tremendous applause at the end of each act and the close of the play.

Mr. Henry Butcher made a grateful little speech, and, looking toward Old Mole's box, said the author was not in the house. All eyes were turned toward the box, and the shouting was renewed.

Entirely unconscious of the attention and interest they were arousing, the party escaped. Robert was hungry and insisted on having oysters. As they ate them they discussed the play. Robert and Matilda were enthusiastic, Old Mole was dubious and depressed, and Panoukian contemptuous.

"I've seen worse," he said, "but nothing with quite so much effrontery. It was like having your face dabbed with a baby's powder puff. I felt all the time that in a moment they would have a child saying its prayers on the stage. But they never did, and there was extraordinary pleasure in the continual dread of it, and the continual sense of relief. And every now and then they made one laugh. I believe it will succeed."

It succeeded. The critics unanimously agreed that the new play had charm, and, said one of them: "It is with plays, as with women; if they have charm, you need look no further. All London will be at Lossie's feet."

At the end of the first week Old Mole received a check for one hundred and ten pounds; at the end of the second a check for one hundred and twenty-five. He sent two cablegrams to Carlton Timmis and Cuthbert Jones at Crown Imperial, British Columbia. No answer. Timmis (or Jones) had disappeared.

Money poured in.

The play was bought by cable for America, and five hundred pounds passed into Old Mole's account. It became almost a horror to him to open his letters lest they should contain a check.

Worst of all, the newspapers scented "copy." A successful play, a vanished author, no one to claim the fame and fortune lying there. One paper undertook to find Carlton Timmis. It published photographs of him, scraps of biography and anecdotes, but Timmis remained hidden, and the newspapers yelled, in effect, "Where is Timmis? The public wants Timmis. Wireless has tracked a murderer to his doom, surely it cannot fail to reveal the whereabouts of the public's new darling?" Another journal found its way to the heart (_i.e.,_ the box office) of the theater and asked in headlines, "_Is Butcher Paying Royalties_?" Butcher wrote to say that he was paying royalties to the owner of the play, whose name was not Carlton Timmis. And at last a third newspaper announced the name of the beneficiary of the play--H. J. Beenham. Gray's Inn was besieged. Old Mole was in despair and declared that they would have to pack up and go away until the uproar had died down, but, more sensibly, Matilda invited a journalist in, gave him a drink, and told him the little there was to tell. The next check was for a hundred and eighty pounds.

Money poured in.

Five companies were sent out with "Lossie Loses" in America, three in England, and the play was given in Australia and South Africa. It was also published. Money poured in. It came in tens, in hundreds, in thousands of pounds. It became a purely automatic process, and Old Mole quickly lost interest in it and ceased to think about it. He told himself that it would soon come to an end, that such a violent eruption of gold could not last very long, and his attention was engrossed by its effects.

In his own mind it had brought about no moral crisis like that of his first catastrophe, but, insensibly, it had altered his point of view, given him a sense of security that was almost paralyzing in its comfort. All his old thoughts had been in self-protection against the people with whom he had come in contact, people to whom he was a stranger, different from themselves, and therefore suspect. But now in London when he met new people they bowed before him, put themselves out to ingratiate him, almost, it seemed, though he hated to think so, to placate him. His name was known. He was Mr. Beenham, and was somehow responsible for "Lossie Loses," which everybody had seen and the public so loved that three matinées a week were necessary, and there were beginning to be Lossie collars and Lossie hats and Lossie muffs and Lossie biscuits and Lossie corsets. . . . And his sister had called on Matilda and removed that source of bitterness. And at the club men sought his acquaintance. He had letters from more than one of his old colleagues at Thrigsby and several of his former pupils sought him out. A few of them were distinguished men--a doctor, a barrister, a journalist, the editor of a weekly literary review. They invited him to their houses, and he was delighted with the ease and grace with which Matilda bore herself and was more than a match for their wives, and became friendly with one or two of them. They moved among people whose lives were easy and smooth-running in roomy, solidly furnished houses, all very much like each other in style and taste. The people they met at these houses in South Kensington and Hampstead were almost monotonously alike. At the doctor's house they met doctors, at the barrister's solicitors and more barristers, at the editor's journalists and writers. They were different only in their professions: those apart, they were as alike as fossil ammonites in different strata: and they all "loved" "Lossie Loses." The women were very kind to Matilda and invited her to their tea parties and "hen" luncheons. She read the books they read and began to have "views" and opinions, and to know the names of the twentieth century poets; she picked up a smattering of the jargon of painting and music just as she caught the trick of being smart in her dress, and for the same reason, because the other women had "views" and opinions and talked of music and painting and were smart in their dress. The eruption of gold into their lives had blown her desire to return to the theater into the air. She was fully occupied with dressing, buying clothes, ever more clothes, and arranging for the hospitality they received and gave.

Her husband was amazed at the change in her. It was as startling as the swift growth of a floundering puppy into a recognizable dog. It was not merely a matter of pinning on clothes and opinions and a set of fashionable ideas: there was real growth in the woman which enabled her to wear these gewgaws with ease and grace so that they became her and were an ornament, absurd it is true, but so generally worn--though rarely with such tact--that their preposterousness was never noticed in the crowd. She was gayer and easier, and she seemed to have lost the tug and strain at her heart. Often in the daytime she was dull and listless, but she never failed to draw upon some mysterious reserve of vitality for the evening.

He was sometimes alarmed when he watched the other women who had not her freshness, and saw how some of them had ceased to be anything but views and opinions and clothes. But he told himself that she was not tied, as the rest were, by their husband's professions, to London, and that they could always go away when they were tired of it. . . . He was often bored and exhausted, but he put up with it all, partly because of the pleasure she was finding in that society, and partly because he felt that he was getting nearer that indeterminate but magnetically irresistible goal which had been set before him on--when was it?--on the night when his thoughts had taken form and life and he had been launched into that waking dreamland. With that, even the most violent happenings seemed to have very little to do; they were almost purely external. One might have a startling adventure every day, and be no nearer the goal. One might have so many adventures that his capacity to enjoy them would be exhausted. There was, he felt sure, as he pondered the existence of these professional people and saw how many of them were jaded by habit, but were carried on by the impetus of the habits of their kind, so that they were forever seeking to crowd into their days and nights far more people, thoughts, ideas, books, æsthetic emotions than they would hold--there was somewhere in experience a point at which living overflowed into life and was therein justified. So much seemed clear, and it was that point that he was seeking. In his relationship with Matilda, in his love for her, he had striven to force his way to it. The violence of his meeting with her, the brutality of his breach with his old existence, had, by reflex action, led him to violence and brutality even in his kindness, even in his attempted sympathy.

That seemed sound reasoning, and it led him to the knowledge that Matilda had plunged into the life of the professional people with its round of pleasures and functions, its absorption in tailors and mummers and the amusers of the people, its entire devotion to amusement, as a protection against himself. It was an unpleasant realization, but amid so much pleasantness it was bracing.

Money poured in. "Lossie Loses" was visited by all the Royal Family. When it had been performed two hundred and fifty times the Birthday Honors list was published and Henry Butcher was acclaimed "our latest theatrical knight." He gave a supper party on the stage to celebrate the two occasions; and he invited Mr. and Mrs. Beenham.

There were present the Solicitor-General, Mr. Justice Sloppy, the three celebrated daughters of two dukes, the daughters-in-law of three Cabinet Ministers, a millionaire, two novelists, five "absolutely established" dramatists, three dramatic critics, nine theatrical knights, the ten most beautiful women in London, the Keeper of the Coptic Section of the South Kensington Museum, Tipton Mudde, the aviator, and Archdeacon Froude, the Chaplain of the Actors' Union. There were others who were neither named nor catalogued in the newspaper (Court and Society) next day. As Mr. Justice Sloppy said, in the speech of the evening: "For brains and beauty he had never seen anything like it. . . ." The toasts were the King, Sir Henry Butcher, Lossie, and the Public, and there, as Panoukian remarked when the feast was described to him, you have the whole thing in a nutshell, the topnotch of English philosophy, the expression of the English ideal, lots of food, lots of drink, lots of talk, of money, of people, and then a swollen gratitude--"God bless us every one." And Panoukian then developed a theory that England, the English character, had reached its zenith and come to flower and fruit in the genius of Charles Dickens. Thereafter was nothing but the fading of leaves, the falling of leaves, the drowsing into hibernation. He was excited by the idea of falling leaves to describe the intellectual and moral activity of the country. It would seem to explain the extraordinary predominance of the Harbottles, who were so thick upon every English institution that Vallombrosa was nothing to it.

Old Mole met Tyler Harbottle again, and, allowing for Panoukian's youthful exaggeration, had to admit the justice of his estimate. Harbottle was very like a falling leaf, blown hither and thither upon every gust of wind, dropping, skimming, spinning in the air, but all the time obeying only one impulse, the law of gravity, which sent him down to the level of the ground, the public. Seeing nothing but the public, nothing beyond it, hoping for nothing but a comfortable resting place when at last he came to earth, Harbottle was under the illusion that the winds that tossed him came from the public, and when they blew him one way he said, "I will go that way," and when they blew him another he said, "I will go this." He was a Unionist Free Trader in theory and by label: in practice he was an indefatigable wirepuller. By himself he was unimportant, but there were so many of him and his kind that he had to be placated.

Old Mole met all the Harbottles. After Sir Henry Butcher's party he and Matilda were squeezed up into a higher stratum of society. Tipton Mudde took Matilda up in his monoplane and thereafter their whole existence grew wings and flew. They now met the people of whom their professional acquaintances had talked. The triumph of "Lossie Loses" continued: it was said the play would beat the record of "Our Boys." Money poured in, and almost as bewildering was the number of invitations--to vast dinner parties, to at homes, to drawing-room meetings, to boxes at the Opera, to luncheons at the luxurious hotels, to balls, to political receptions, to banquets given to celebrate honors won or to mark the end of a political campaign, or to welcome an actor-manager home from Australia. Whenever a Harbottle pulled out a plum from the pie than the subtler Harbottles buzzed like flies around it and arranged to eat and drink and make merry or at least to make speeches.

For a time it was very good fun. Old Mole and Matilda did as the Harbottles did. They had so many engagements that they were compelled to buy a motorcar and to engage a chauffeur. Without it Matilda could never have found time to buy her clothes. She went to the dressmaker patronized by all the female Harbottles, but the dressmaker made for an old-fashioned duchess, who adhered to the figure of the nineties and refused to be straight-fronted. The female Harbottles fled from this horrid retrogression and made the fortune of an obscure little man in Chelsea.

It was good fun for a time, and Old Mole was really interested. Here on the top of English life, its head and front--for the great-leisured governing classes no longer governed; they had feudal possessions but not the feudal political power--was a little world whizzing like a zoetrope. You might peep through the chinks and the figures inside it would seem to be alive, but when you were inside it there were just a number of repetitions of the same figures in poses disintegrated from movement. The machine whizzed round, but what was the force that moved it? Impossible to enter it except by energy or some fluke that made you rich enough or famous enough for there to be flattery in your acquaintance. True, Old Mole only saw the figures inside the machine arranged for pleasure. They were workers, too, but their pleasure was a part of their work. Lawyers who were working eighteen hours a day could find time to visit three great entertainments in an evening; politicians after an all-night sitting in the House could dine out, see two acts of the Opera, or the ballet, or an hour or so of a revue, and then return to the division Lobbies; actors, after two performances in the day, could come on to a reception at midnight and eat caviare and drink champagne. There were very few of whom it could be said that the rout was the breath of their nostrils; but all continued in it, all accepted it as a normal condition of things, as the proper expression of the nation's finest energies. Impossible to avoid it, furtherance of ambition and young devotion to an ideal both led to it. . . . Pitchforked into it so suddenly, with so many vivid impressions after wanderings, Old Mole felt how completely it was cut off from the life of the country, because from the inside and the outside of the machine things looked so entirely different. He had to go no further than his own case. On all hands he heard it said so often that "Lossie Loses" was a wonderful play--"so delicate, so fanciful, so full of the poetry of common things"--that it needed only a very little weakening of his critical faculty for him to begin to believe it and greedily to accept the position it had given him. As it was, knowing its intrinsic falsehood and baseness, he marveled that people of so much intelligence could be bemused by success into such jockeying of their standards. But he began to perceive that there were no standards, neither of life nor of art. There could not be, for there was no time for valuation, just as there was no time for thinking. Here and there he found an ideal or two, but such wee, worn, weary little things, so long bandied about among brains that could not understand them and worried into a decline by the shoddy rhetorical company they had been forced to keep. Arguing from his own case, Old Mole came to the conclusion that the whole whirligig had come about from a constant succession of decent ordinary mortals having been, like himself, the victims of an eruption of gold which had carried them, without sufficient struggle or testing of imagination or moral quality, to an eminence above their fellows, upon which, in their bewilderment, they were conscious of nothing but a dread of falling down. In that dread, sharing no other emotion, they clung together fearfully, met superficially, were never content unless they were meeting superficially, creating flattery and even more flattery to cover their dread. And, as they were forever gazing downward into the depths from which they had been raised, it was impossible for them to see more than a yard or so further than their own feet. Fearful of taking a false step, they never moved; their minds curled up and went to sleep. They could create nothing, and could only imitate and reproduce. They had abandoned the dull habits of the middle class and yet were the slaves of middle-class ideas. There were very charming people among them, but they accepted good-humoredly that England had nothing better to offer. They had pleasant houses in Town and in the country, delightful and amusing people to visit them, to keep them from boredom, and they asked no more.

Old Mole studied the history of England, the railway frenzy, the growth of the manufacturing districts, the foundation of the great shipbuilding yards, the immense eruption of gold that had swept away the old, careless, negligent, ruling squires, and set in their place those who could survive the scramble. And the scramble had never ceased; it had been accepted as the normal state of things. The heat and excitement of the rout gave the illusion of energy, which, being without moral direction, was pounced upon by the English desire for comfort and the appearance of solidarity, the mania for having the best of everything in the belief that it will never be bettered. So against the inconveniences of an antiquated system of laws, a mean and narrow code of morals, the consequences of their own reckless disregard of health in the building of the great cities of industry, in the payment of those who labored in them, they padded themselves in with comfort, more and more of it.

"Almost," said Old Mole, "I am persuaded to become a Jew, to sweat the sweaters, pick the profits, rule the world in honor of the cynical Hebrew god who created it, and live in uneasy triumph in the domestic virtues and worship of the flesh uncrucified."

Once you have been drawn into the machine it is very difficult to get out of it. Old Mole struggled, but money and invitations came pouring in. "Lossie Loses" survived two holiday seasons. During the second the actress who played Lossie went away on her vacation, and Matilda, urged on by Butcher, with whom she had become friendly, played the part, was successful, and gave the piece a new spurt of vitality. It was not a brilliant performance, but then a brilliant performance would have killed the play. The play needed charm, Matilda had it, and, by this time, among so many expertly charming women, she had learned how to manipulate it. Her appearance on the stage extended her popularity among her distinguished acquaintances, but subtly changed her status, and she had to learn how to defend herself. Her life became more exciting and she expanded in response to it. She distressed Old Mole by talking about her adventures, and he began to think it was really time to go.

They went abroad for several months, to Paris, Florence, Rome, Sicily, Algiers, but as they stayed in luxurious and expensive hotels they might almost as well have stayed in London. Old Mole discovered nothing except that the eruption of gold must have been universal and that the character of the English nation had found its most obvious expression in its stout, solid, permanent telegraph poles.

They returned to London, and Matilda accepted a small part in a new play by a famous dramatist, who had borrowed "Lossie" from the "greatest success of the century," called her "Blendy," and set her to leaven the mixture he had produced after the two years' hard work fixed as the proper quantum by Henrik Ibsen.

More success.

And Old Mole, feeling that he was now beyond all hope of escape, since he was suffering from a noticeable fatty degeneration of the will, had argued with Matilda, but she had had her way, for he could find no rejoinder to her plea that it was "something to do."

He refused to leave Gray's Inn. She was tired of it; said the rooms were cramped, but he clung to it as an anchorage.