Part 15

There was a steadying of their existence. She took her work seriously, and rested as much as possible during the day. In the evenings he missed her, and he detested having his dinner at half-past six. But the discomfort was a relief and gave him a much needed sharpening of the wits. Every night he met her at the theater and made more acquaintances in it. He applied his theory of the eruption of gold to them, and, studying them for that purpose, was amazed to find how little different they were from Mr. Copas and the miserable John Lomas. Copas had been untouched by the eruption. These men, and particularly Henry Butcher and Matilda's manager, were Copas varnished and polished. Beneath the varnish they were exactly the same; self-important, self-centered, entirely oblivious of life outside the theater, utterly unheeding of everything outside their profession that could not be translated into its cant and jargon, childishly jealous, greedy of applause, sensitive of opinion, boys with the appetites and desires of grown men, human beings whose development had been arrested, who, in a healthy society, would be rogues and vagabonds, or wandering adventurers, from sheer inability to accept the restrictions and discipline imposed by social responsibility. They were cruelly placed, for they were in a position needing adult powers, having audiences night after night vaster than could be gathered for any divine or politician or demagogue; they had to win their own audiences, for no theater was subsidized; and when they had won them they were mulcted in enormous sums for rent; they were sucked, like the other victims of the eruption, into the machine, the zoetrope, and being there, in that trap and lethal chamber of spontaneity, they had to charm their audiences, with nothing more than the half-ideas, the sentimental conventions, the clipped emotions of their fellow sufferers. They were squeezed out of their own natures, forced into new skins, could only retain their positions by the successful practice of their profession, and were forced to produce plays and shows out of nothing, being robbed both of their Copas-like delight in their work and of their material for it. Their position was calamitous and must have been intolerable without the full measure of applause and flattery bestowed on them.

Clearly it was not through the theater that Old Mole could find the outlet he was seeking.

He turned wearily from its staleness, and told himself, after long pondering of the problem, that he had been mistaken, that he had been foolishly, and a little arrogantly, seeking in life the imaginative force, the mastery of ideas and human thoughts and feelings that he had found in literature. Life, maybe, proceeds through eruption and epidemic; art through human understanding and sympathy and will. . . . That pleased him as a definite result, but at once he was offended by the separation, yet, amid so much confusion, it was difficult to resist the appeal of so clean and sharp a conception. It lost the clarity of its outline when he set it against his earlier idea of living brimming over into life. . . . There were then three things, living, life and art, a Trinity, three lakes fed by the same river. That was large and poetic, but surely inaccurate. For, in that order, the lakes must be fed by a strange river that flowed upward. . . . Anyhow, it was something to have established the three things which could comprise everything that had penetrated his own consciousness, three things which were of the same essence, expressions of the same force. Within the action and interaction there seemed to be room for everything, even for Sir Henry Butcher, even for Tyler Harbottle, M.P.

He had arrived at the sort of indolent charity which, in the machine, passes for wisdom and sanity, the unimaginative tolerance which furs and clogs all the workings of a man's mind and heart. It is not far removed from indifference. . . . In his weariness, the exhaustion and satiety of the modern world, he measured his wisdom by the folly of others, and in his satisfaction at the discrepancy found conceit and thought it confidence. He began to write again and returned to his projected essay on Woman, believing that he had in his idea disentangled the species from Matilda. He was convinced that he had risen above his love for her, to the immense profit of their relationship, which had become more solid, settled and pleasurable. As he had planned when they came to London, so it had happened. They had gone their ways, seemed for a time to lose sight of each other, met again, and were now--were they not?--journeying on apace along life's highway, hailing the travelers by the road, aiding the weary, cracking a joke and a yarn with those of good cheer, staying in pleasant inns.

"Something like a marriage!" thought he. "Life's fullest adventure."

And he measured his marriage against those of the men and women in the machine; sour captivity for the most part, or a shallow, prattling and ostentatious devotion.

His essay on Woman was only a self-satisfied description of his marriage. Out of the writing of it came no profit except to his vanity. Preoccupied with questions of style, he pruned and pared it down, refashioned and remodeled it until at last he could not read it himself. Having no convenient sands in which to bury it, he gave it to Panoukian to read.

Panoukian was in that stage of development (which has nothing to do with age) when a man needs to find his fellows worshipful and looks for wonders from them. He was very young, and kindness from a man older than himself could bowl him over completely, set his affections frothing and babbling over his judgment, so that he became enslaved and sycophantish, and prepared, mentally if not physically, to stand on his head if it so happened that the object of his admiration could be served by it. He was in a nervous state of flux, possessing small mastery over his faculties, many of which were only in bud; his life was so little his own, was so shapeless and unformed that there could be no moderation in him; his admirations were excessive, had more than once landed him in the mire, so that he was a little afraid of them, and to guard against these dangers sought refuge in intolerance. To prevent himself seeing beauty and nobility and being intoxicated by them, he created bugbears for himself and hated them, and was forever tracking them down and finding their marks in the moot innocent persons and places. He was very young, mightily in love with love, so that he was forever guarding himself from coming to it too early and being fobbed off with love cheapened or soiled. His passion was for "reality," of which he had only the most shapeless and uncommunicable conception, but he was always talking about it with fierce denunciations of all the people who seemed to him to be deliberately, with criminal folly, burking it. For this reality his instinct was to preserve himself, and he lived in terror of his loneliness driving him to headlong falls from which he might never be able to recover. He was a full-blooded, healthy young man and must have been wretchedly unhappy had it not been that people, in their indolent, careless way, were often enough kind to him to draw off some of his accumulated enthusiasm in an explosive admiration and effusive, though tactfully manipulated, affection. Old Mole was kinder to him than anyone had ever been except his father, but then his father had had no other methods than those of common sense, while in Old Mole there was a subtlety always surprising and refreshing. Also Old Mole was prepared almost indefinitely, as it seemed, to listen to Panoukian's views and opinions and rough winnowing of the wheat from the chaff of life, so far as he had experienced it.

Panoukian therefore read Old Mole's manuscript with the fervor of a disciple, and found in it the heat and vigor which he himself always brought to their discussions. The essay, indeed, was like the master's talk, cool and deliberate, broken in its monotony by comical little stabs of malice. The writing was fastidious and competent. Panoukian thought the essay a masterpiece, and there crept a sort of reverence into his attitude toward its author. This was an easy transition, for he had never quite shaken off the rather frightened respect of the pupil for the schoolmaster. Then, to complete his infatuation, he contrasted Old Mole with his employer, Harbottle.

And Old Mole was fond of Panoukian. At first it was the sort of amused tenderness which it is impossible not to feel on the sight of a leggy colt in a field or a woolly kitten staggering after a ball. Then, by association and familiarity, it was enriched and became a thing as near friendship as there can be between men of widely different ages, between immaturity and ripeness. It saved the situation for both of them, the young man from his wildness, the older from the violent distortion of values which had become necessary if he were to move easily and comfortably in the swim. Above all, for Old Mole, it was amusing. For Panoukian nothing was amusing. In his intense longing for the "reality" of his dreams he hated amusement; he detested the vast expenditure of energy in the modern world on making existence charming and pleasant and comfortable, the elaborate ingenuity with which the facts of life were hidden and glossed over; he despised companionable books, and fantastical pictures and plays, luxurious entertainments, magazines filled with advertisements and imbecile love-stories, kinematographs, spectacular football, could not understand how any man could devote his energies to the creation of them and retain his sincerity and honesty. He adored what he called the English genius, and was disappointed and hurt because the whole of English life was not a spontaneous expression of it, and he found one of his stock examples in architecture. He would storm and inveigh against the country because the English architectural tradition had been allowed to lapse away back in the dark ages of the nineteenth century. He had many other instances of the obscuring or sudden obliteration of the fairest tendencies of the English genius, and to their mutual satisfaction, Old Mole would put it all down to his theory of the eruption of gold.

Nearly all Panoukian's leisure was spent at Gray's Inn or out with Old Mole and Matilda, or with them on their visits to those of their friends to whom they had introduced him. He was good-looking, well built, easily adept at ball-games--for he possessed a quick, sure eye--and his shy frankness made him likeable. The charm of English country life would soften his violence and soothe his prejudices, but only the more, when he returned to London, would he chafe against the incessant pursuit of material advantages, the mania of unselective acquisition, the spinning and droning of the many-colored humming-top.

From the first moment he had been Matilda's slave, and no trouble was too great, no time too long, no task too tedious, if only he could yield her some small service. He would praise her to Old Mole:

"She is so real. Compare her with other women. She does all the things they do, and does them better. She takes them in her stride. She can laugh with you, talk with you, understand what you mean better than you do yourself, give you just the little encouragement you need, and you can talk to her and forget that she is a woman. . . . You don't know, sir, what an extraordinary difference it has made in my life since I have known you two."

That would embarrass Old Mole, and he found it impossible to say anything without jarring Panoukian's feelings. Therefore he would say nothing, and later he would look at Matilda, watch her, wait for her smile, and wonder. Her smile was the most surprising, the most intimate gift he ever had from her. Often for days together they would hardly see each other and, when they met, would have little to say, but he would watch until he could meet her gaze, win a smile from her, and feel her friendliness, her interest, and know that they still had much to share and were still profoundly aware of each other. He would say to her sometimes:

"I don't see much of you nowadays."

She would answer:

"But you are so interested in so many things. And I like my life."

And in the gentle gravity with which she now spoke to him, which was in every gesture of her attitude toward him, he would discern a fuller grace than any he had hoped to find in her. She was so trim and neat, so well disciplined, so delicate and nice in all she did; restrained and subtle but with no loss of force. Even her follies, the absurd modish tricks she had caught in the theater and among the women who fawned on her, seemed no impediment to her impulse should the moment come for yielding to it. She was no more spendthrift of emotion and affection than she was of money, and, almost, he thought, too thorough in her self-effacement and endeavor to be no kind of burden upon him.

"I am so proud of you!" he would say.

And she would smile and answer:

"You don't know, you never will know, how grateful I am to you."

But her eyes would gaze far beyond him, through him, and light up wistfully, and he would have a queer discomfortable sensation of being a sojourner in his own house. Then he would think and puzzle over Panoukian's rapturous description of her. She was discreet and guarded: only her smile was intimate; her thoughts, if she had thoughts, were shy and never sought out his; demonstrative she never was. She led a busy, active life, the normal existence of moneyed or successful women in London, and she was distinguished in her efficiency. She had learned and developed taste, and was ever transforming the chambers in Gray's Inn, driving out Robert and installing in every corner of it the expression of her own personality. After the first dazzling discovery of the possibilities of clothes she had rebelled against the price charged by the fashionable dressmakers and made her own gowns. Robert used to twit her about her restlessness, and declared that one week when he came he would find her wearing the curtains, and the next her gown would be covering the cushions. Old Mole used to tease her, too, but what she would take quite amiably from Robert she could not endure from him.

"I thought you'd like it," she would say.

"But, my dear, I do like it!"

"Then why do you make fun of me?"

And sometimes there would be tears. Once it came to a quarrel, and after they had made it up she said she wanted a change, and went off to stay with Bertha Boothroyd. In two days she was back again with the most maliciously funny description of Jim's reception of her and his absolute refusal to leave her alone with Bertha lest she should be contaminated. Then she was gay and light-hearted, glad to be back again and more busy than ever, and when Panoukian came to see them she teased him out of his solemnity and earnestness almost into tears of rage. She told him he ought to go to Thrigsby and work, find some real work to do and not loaf about in London, in blue socks and white spats, waiting until he was old enough to be taken seriously.

He went away in the depths of misery, and she said to Old Mole:

"Why don't you find him something to do?"

"I? How can I find him. . . ?"

"Don't you know that you are a very important person? You know everybody who is anybody, and there is nobody you can't know if you want to. Think of the hundreds of men in London who spend their whole lives struggling to pull themselves up into your position so that in the end they may have the pleasure of jobbing some one into a billet."

"That," said Old Mole, "is what Panoukian calls Harbottling."

She made him promise to think it over, and he began to dream of a career for Panoukian, a real career on the lines of Self-Help.

In his original pedagogic relation with Panoukian he had blocked out for him an ascent upon well-marked and worn steps through Oxford into the Home Civil Service, wherein by the proper gradations he should rise to be a Permanent Under-Secretary and a Knight, and a credit to the school. To the altered Panoukian and to Old Mole's changed and changing mind that ambitious flight was now inadequate. Panoukian was undoubtedly intelligent. Old Mole had not yet discovered the idea that could baffle him, and he was positively reckless in his readiness to discard those which neither fitted into the philosophy he for the moment held nor seemed to lead to a further philosophy at which he hoped to arrive. Every day Panoukian became more youthful and every day more breathlessly irreverent. Nothing was sacred to him: he insisted on selecting his own great men, and Old Mole was forced to admit that there was some wisdom in his choice. He read Voltaire and hated organized religion; Nietzsche and detested the slothfulness and mean egoism of the disordered collection of human lives called democracy; Butler and quizzed at the most respected and dozing of English institutions; Dostoevsky and yearned out in a thinly passionate sympathy to the suffering and the diseased and the victims of grinding poverty. He was not altogether the slave of his great men: after all they were dead; life went on and did not repeat itself, and he (Panoukian) was in the thick of it, and determined not to be crushed by it into a cushioned ease or the sodden insensibility of too great misery.

"My problem," he would say, "is myself. My only possible and valid contribution to any general problem is the effective solution of that. In other words, can I or can I not become a human being? If I succeed I help things on by that much; if I fail, I become a Harbottle and retard things by that much. Do you follow me?"

Old Mole was not at all sure that he did, but he found Panoukian refreshing, for there was in him something both to touch the affections and excite the mind, and in his immediate surroundings there was very little to do as much. There were men who talked, men who did little or nothing else; but they lacked warmth, they were Laputans living on a floating island above a land desolate in the midst of plenty. Among such men it was difficult to conceive of Panoukian finding a profitable occupation. Take him out of politics, and where could he be placed? For what had his education fitted him? Panoukian had had every kind of education. He had begun life in an elementary school, passed on by his own cleverness to a secondary school, and from that to the university where contact with the ancient traditions of English culture, manhood and citizenship had flung him into revolt and set him thinking about life before he had lived, braying about among philosophies before he had need of any. There was a fine stew in his brain, a tremendous array of ideas beleaguering Panoukian without there being any actual definite Panoukian to beleaguer. Certainly Old Mole could not remember ever having been in such a state himself, nor in any generation subsequent to his own could he remember symptoms which could account for the phenomenon. He had to look far to discover other Panoukians. They were everywhere, male and female. He set himself to discover them; they were in journalism, in science, in the schools of art, on the stage, writing wonderfully bad books, producing mannered and deliberately ugly verse, quarreling among themselves, wrangling, detesting each other, impatient, intolerant, outraging convention and their affectionate and well-meaning parents and guardians, united only in the one savage determination not to lick the boots of the generation that preceded them. When they could admire they worshiped; they needed to admire; they wanted to admire all men, and those men whom they found unadmirable they hated.

It was all very well (thought Old Mole) for Matilda with her cool common sense to say that Panoukian must do something. What could he do? His only positive idea seemed to be that he would not become a Harbottle; and how better could he set about that than by living among the species with the bitterness of his hatred sinking so deep into his soul that in the end it must become sweetness? In theory Panoukian was reckless and violent; in practice he was affectionate and generous, much too full of the spasmodic, shy kindness of the young to fit into the Self-Help tradition. Indeed, it was just here that the Panoukians, male and female, were so astonishing. For generations in England personal ambition had been the only motive force, the sole measure of virtue, and it was personal ambition that they utterly ignored. They were truly innocent of it. Upon that axis the society in which they were born revolved. They could not move with it, for it seemed to them stationary, and it was abhorrent to them. Their thoughts were not the thoughts of the people around them. They could neither speak the old language nor invent a new speech in which to make themselves understood. Virtue they could perceive in their young hunger for life, but virtue qualified by personal ambition and subserving it they could not understand. They were asking for bread and always they were offered stones. . . . Old Mole could not see what better he could do than be kind to Panoukian, defend him from his solitude and give him the use of the advantages in the "swim" of London which he had no mind himself to employ.

One of the few definite and tangible planks in Panoukian's program was a stubborn conviction that he must have an "idea" of everything. It was, he insisted, abominable to live in London unless there was in his mind a real conception of London.

"You see," he would say, "it would be charming and pleasant to accept London as consisting of the Temple, the House and Gray's Inn, with an imperceptible thread of vitality other than my own to bind them together. We've had enough of trying to make life charming and pleasant. All that is just swinish rolling in the mud. Do you follow me? We've had enough. We were begotten and conceived and born in the mud, and we've got to get out of it; and, unless you see that mud is mud, you can't see the hills beyond, and the clear rivers, and the sky. Can you?"

"No, you can't," said Old Mole, groping about in his incoherence, and speaking only because Panoukian was waiting for a shove into his further speculations.

"I mean, London may be all in a mess, which it is, but if I haven't a clear idea of the mess I can't begin to mop it up, and I can't begin on it at all until I've cleaned up the bit of the mess that is in myself, can I? I mean, take marriage, for instance."

"By all means, take marriage."

"Well, you're married and I'm not, but it isn't a bit of good screaming about marriage unless your own marriage is straightened out and,--you know what I mean?--understood, is it? . . ."