Part 16

So he would go on, whirling from one topic to another--marriage, morals, democracy, the will to power,--thinking in sharp contrasts, sometimes hardly thinking, but feeling always. Vaguely, without objects, catching himself out in some detestable sentimentality, admitting it frankly and going back again over his whole argument to pluck it out. Panoukian was to himself a weedy field, and with bowed back and stiffened loins he was engrossed in stubbing it. It was exhausting to watch him at it, and when, as sometimes happened, Old Mole saw things through Panoukian's eyes he was disquieted. Then there seemed no security in existence; civilization was no longer an achievement, but a fluid stream flowing over a varied bed--rock, pebbles, mud, sand; society was no establishment, but a precarious, tottering thing, a tower of silted sands with an oozy base, blocking the river, squeezing it into a narrow and unpleasant channel. In the nature of things and its law the river would one day gather unto itself great waters and bear the sands away. . . . Meanwhile men strove to make the sand heap habitable, for they were born on it, lived and died on it, and never looked beyond. Their whole lives were filled with dread of its crumbling, their whole energies devoted to building up against it and against the action of wind and rain and sun. They built themselves in and looked not out, and made their laws by no authority but only by expediency. And the young men, in their vitality too great for such confinement, knew that somewhere there must be firm ground, and were determined to excavate and to explore. And Old Mole wished them well in the person of Panoukian.

That young man set himself to discover London. He was forever coming to Gray's Inn with exciting tales of streets discovered down by the docks or in the great regions of the northern suburbs. He set himself to walk from end to end of it, from Ealing to West Ham, from Dulwich to Tottenham, and he vowed that there were men really living in it, and he began to think of the democracy as a real entity, to be exalted at the thought of its power. Old Mole demurred. The democracy had no power, since it knew not how to grasp it. Its only instrument was the vote, which was the engine of the Harbottles, the nibblers, the place-seekers, the pleasure-hunters, those who scrambled to the top of the sandy tower, where in the highest cavern there were at least air and light and only the faintest stench from the river's mud. Here there was so much divergence between Old Mole and Panoukian that they ceased to talk the same language, and Old Mole would try another tack and reach the stop-gap conclusion that the difference came about from the fact that Gray's Inn was very comfortable, while Panoukian's chambers in the Temple were bleak and bare. That was unsatisfactory, for Panoukian would inveigh against comfort and vow, as indeed was obvious, that no one had yet devised a profitable means of spending a private income of thirty thousand a year. After reading an economic treatise he came to the conclusion that the whole political problem resolved itself into the wages question. Old Mole hated problems and questions. They parched his imagination. His whole pleasure in Panoukian's society lay in the young man's power to flood ideas with his vitality. He argued on economic lines and gradually forced the young man up to the spiritual plane and then gave him his conception of society as a sand heap. That fired Panoukian. Was it or was it not necessary for human beings to live upon shifting ground, with no firm foothold? And he said that the great men had been those who had gone out into the world and brought back tales of the fair regions contained therein.

"They have dreamed of fair regions," said Old Mole, "but no man has ever gone out to them."

"Then," said Panoukian, "it is quite time some one did."

Matilda came in on that, caught the last words, and asked hopefully:

"What is it you are going to do?"

"He is going," said Old Mole, "to discover the bedrock of life and live on it."

"Is that all?" Matilda looked disappointed. "I hoped it was something practical at last."

The two men tried to carry on the discussion, but she closured it by saying that she wanted to be taken out to dinner and amused. Panoukian flew to dress himself in ordered black and white, and Matilda said to Old Mole:

"The trouble with you two is that you have too much money."

"That, my dear, is the trouble with almost everybody, and, like everybody else, we sit on it and talk."

"It would do you both a world of good to have some real hard, unpleasant work."

"I can't agree with you. For twenty-five years I had real, hard, unpleasant work five days in the week, and it profited neither myself nor anybody else. I went on with it because it seemed impossible to leave it. It left me, and my life has been a much brighter and healthier thing to me. Panoukian is young enough to talk himself into action. I shall go on talking forever."

And he went on talking. Matilda produced a workbox and a pile of stockings and began darning them. They sat one on either side of the fireplace, and in the chimney sounded the explosive coo of a pigeon.

"My dear," said Old Mole, "you know, I believe in Panoukian. I believe he will make something of himself. I fancy that when he is mature enough to know what he wants he will be absolutely ruthless in making for it."

"Do you?"

Matilda rolled a pair of stockings up into a ball and tossed them into a basket on the sofa some yards away. It was a neat shot, and Old Mole admired the gesture with which she made it, the fling of the arm, the swift turn of the wrist.

"I do," he said. "Until then there can be no harm in his talking."

"No. I suppose not. But you do go on so."

Panoukian returned. Matilda made ready, and they set out. Old Mole took them up to the Holborn gate and watched them walk along toward Chancery Lane. It was a July evening. He watched them until they were swallowed up in the hurrying crowd, the young man tall and big, towering above Matilda small and neat. He saw one or two men in the street turn and look at her, at them perhaps, for they made a handsome couple. He admired them and was moved, and a mist covered his spectacles. He took them off and wiped them. Then, kindling to the thought of a quiet evening to end in the excitement of their return, he walked slowly back under the windows flaring in the sunset.

"Truly," he said, "the world is with the young men. There can be no pleasanter task for the middle-aged than to assist them, but, alas! we can teach them nothing, for, as the years go by, there is more and more to learn."

He sat up until half-past one with the chamber growing ever more chill and empty, and his heart sinking as he thought of accidents that might have befallen them. He was asleep on their return and never knew its precise hour. They gave a perfectly frank and probable account of their doings: dinner at a grill-room, a music-hall, supper at a German restaurant, and then on to an At Home at the Schlegelmeiers', where there had been a squash so thick that once you were in a room it was impossible to move to any of the others. They had been wedged into the gallery of the great drawing-room at Withington House, where the principal entertainment had been a Scotch comedian who chanted lilting ballads. It was this distinguished artist's habit to make his audience sing the chorus of each song, and it had been diverting to see duchesses and ladies of high degree and political hostesses singing with the abandon of the gods at an outlying two-shows-a-night house:

_Rolling, rolling in the heather, All in the bonny August weather, There was me and Leezy Lochy in the dingle, There was Jock and Maggie Kay in the dell, For ilka lassie has her laddie, And ilka laddie has his lassie, And what they dae together I'll na tell, But Leezy, Leezy Lochy in the dingle, Is bonny as the moon above the heather._

Matilda sang the song all through and made Old Mole and Panoukian troll the chorus. There were a freshness and warmth about her that were almost startling, full of mischief and sparkling fun. She teased both the men and mysteriously promised them a great reward if they could guess a riddle.

"My second is in woman but not in man, my first is French, I have two syllables, and you'll never guess."

"Where did you get it?" asked Panoukian.

"I made it up."

So they tried to guess and soon confessed themselves beaten. Then she told them that the second half of the riddle was _sense_, because she never knew a man who had it; and the first half was _non_ and together they made _nonsense_, because she felt like it.

Her mood lasted for five days. Panoukian came in every evening--(she was rehearsing for a new play, but only in the daytime)--and they frolicked and sang and burlesqued their own solemn discussions. On the sixth day her high spirits sank and she was moody and silent. She forbade Panoukian to come in the evening. He came at teatime, and she stayed out. One day Old Mole had tea with Panoukian. They walked in the Temple Gardens afterward, and Panoukian blurted out:

"I don't know if your wife has told you, sir, but after we left the Schlegelmeiers' it was such a glorious night, and we were so glad to be in the air again, that we took a taxi and drove down to Richmond and came back in the dawn. There wasn't any harm in it, as you and I see things, but I've been thinking it over and come to the conclusion that you ought to know."

A sudden anger took possession of Old Mole, and he retorted:

"Of course, if there were any harm in it, you wouldn't tell me."

"Hang it all, sir. You haven't any right to say that to me."

"No, no. Quite right. I haven't. No. I beg your pardon. I'm glad to see you such friends. She isn't very good at making friends. Acquaintances come and go, but there seem to be very few people whom she and I can share."

"I have the profoundest respect for her," said Panoukian. "As we were coming back in the dawn she told me all her life. The things she has suffered, the misery she has come through."

And they fraternized in their sympathy for Matilda. Panoukian gave an instance of her early sufferings. She had never told it to her husband, and he returned to Gray's Inn puzzled and uneasy, to find her sitting idle, doing nothing, with no pretence at activity. He was tender with her, and asked if she might be ill. She said no, but she had been thinking and wanted to know what was the good of anything. She said she knew she never could be like the other women they knew; it wasn't any good, they seemed to feel that she was different and hadn't had their education and pleasant girlhood, and they only wanted her because they thought she was a success. He told her that he wanted nothing less than for her to be like the other women, that he never wanted her to live in and be one of the crowd, but only to be herself, her own brave, delightful self.

"That's what Arthur says." (They had begun to call Panoukian _Arthur_ during their few days of high spirits.) "He says you've got to be yourself or nothing. And I don't understand, and thinking makes it so hard. . . ." She did not want him to speak. She said, "You still love me? You still want me?"

And there came back to him almost the love of their wanderings, the old desire with its sting of jealousy.

For three days after that she never once spoke to him.

It seemed she wrote to Panoukian, for he appeared again on her last night before the opening of the new play, and was there when she returned from the dress rehearsal. She shook hands with him, made him sit by the fireplace opposite Old Mole, took up some sewing, and said:

"Now talk."

After some diffidence Panoukian began, and they came round to "Lossie Loses," the last weeks of which had at length been announced. It would have run for two years and two months. Panoukian's theory of its success was that people were much like children, and once they were pleased with a story wanted it told over and over again without a single variation.

"The public," said Matilda, "are very funny. When they don't listen to you, you think them idiots; when they do, you adore them and think them wonderful."

"I have never felt anything but contempt for them for liking 'Lossie Loses,' " said Old Mole.

"But then," put in Panoukian, "you did not write it. If you had, you would be persuaded by now that it is a masterpiece. That is how Harbottles are made: they attribute their flukes to their skill and insist on being given credit for them."

"I often wonder," said Old Mole, "what the man who wrote it thinks about it. He must surely know by now."

"He must be dead." Matilda swept him out of consideration with her needle. "I don't believe any man would have let it go on so long and not come forward."

Panoukian examined the ethical aspect of the situation, and from that they passed to the discussion of morals, whether there was in fact any valid morality in England, or simply those things were not done which were unpleasant in their consequences. The Ten Commandments were presumably the basis of the nation's morality, since they were read publicly in places of worship every Sunday (though the majority of the adult population never went near any place of worship). How many of the Commandments were closely observed, how many (in the general custom) met with compromise, how many neglected? Murder and the more obvious forms of theft were punished; deliberate and wicked fraud, also, but at every turn the morality had been modified, its bad admitted to be not always and altogether bad, its good equally subject to qualification. It had been whittled and chipped away by non-observance until practically all that was left was a bad consisting of actions which were a palpable nuisance to society, with never a good at all.

"Either," said Panoukian, "the Jewish morality has never been suitable for the Western races or they have never been intelligent enough to grasp its intention or its applicability to the facts of life and the uses of society."

"I wish you wouldn't use so many long words," said Matilda.

But Panoukian rushed on:

"I can't believe in the justice of a morality which is based on the idea of punishment. It is inevitable that such a system should set a premium on skill in evading consequences rather than on right action."

"I believe," said Old Mole, "in tolerance, you can't begin to hold a moral idea without that."

"Right," said Matilda, "is right and wrong is wrong. I always know when I'm doing right and when I'm doing wrong."

"But you do it all the same?" asked Panoukian.

"Oh, yes."

"And so does every healthy human being. So much for morality."

"Don't you believe that people are always punished?" asked Old Mole.

"Certainly not. There are thousands of men who go scot free, and so sink into self-righteousness that more than half their faculties atrophy, and not even the most disastrous calamity, not even the most terrible spiritual affliction, can penetrate to their minds."

"That," said Old Mole, "is the most horrible of punishments and seems to me to show that there is a moral principle in the universe. I find it difficult to understand why moralists are not content to leave it at that, but I have observed that men apply one morality to the actions of others and another to their own. The wicked often prosper, and the righteous are filled with envy and pass judgment, wherein they cease to be righteous."

"My father," said Matilda, "was a very bad man, but I was fond of him. My mother was a good woman, and I never could abide her."

"It is all a matter of affection," quoth Panoukian with more than his usual emphasis.

"I agree," muttered Old Mole.

And all three were surprised at this conclusion. They were uneasily silent for a moment or two, when Panoukian departed. Then Matilda rose and came to her husband and held out her hand. He took it in both his and looked up at her.

"Good night," she said.

"Good night."

"Until to-morrow."

And slowly the smile he loved came to her face. Warmed by it and encouraged, he said:

"Is anything worrying you?"

The smile disappeared.

"No. Nothing. I'm beginning to think about things, and you. It's all so queer. . . . Good night."

And she was gone.

He attended the first night of the new play. Matilda had a larger part, and one very short scene of emotion, or, at least, of what passed for it in the English theater of those days, that is to say it was a nervous and sentimental excitement altogether disproportionate to the action, and not built into the structure of the play, but plastered on to it to conceal an alarming crack in the brickwork. Matilda did very well and only for a moment let the scene slip out of the atmosphere of gimcrackery into the air of life. She did this through defective technique, but that one moment of genuine feeling, even in so false a cause, was so startling as to whip the audience out of its comfortable lethargy into something that was so near pleasure that they could not but applaud. It was an artistic error, since it was her business to be as banal and shallow as the play, which had been made with great mechanical skill so that it required only the superficial service of the actors, and, unlike the candle of the Lord, made no attempt to "search out the inward parts of the belly." In her part Matilda had to discover and betray in one moment her love for the foppish hero of the piece, and being, as aforesaid, wanting in her technical equipment, drew, for the purpose of the scene, on her own imagination, and that which--though she might not know it--had possession of it. The audience was startled into pleasure, Old Mole into something like terror. There was in the woman there on the stage a power, a quality, an essence--he could not find the word--on which he had never counted, for which he had never looked, which now, he most passionately desired to make his own. He knew that it was not artistry in her, his own response to it had too profoundly shaken him; it was living fire, flesh of her flesh, and marvelously made her, for the first time, kin and kind with him. And he knew then that he had been living on theory about her, and was so contemptuous of it and of himself that he brushed aside all thought of the past, all musings and speculations, and was all eagerness to join her, to tell her of the amazing convulsion of himself, and how, at last, through this accident, he had recognized her for what she was. . . . He could not sit through the rest of the play. Its artificiality, its inane falsehood disgusted him. He went out into the brilliantly lighted streets and walked furiously up and down, up and down, and on. And the men and women in the streets seemed small and mechanical, utterly devoid of the vital principle he had discerned in his wife's eyes, voice, gesture, as she played her part. They were just a crowd, mincing and strutting, bound together by nothing but the capacity to move, to place one leg before another and proceed from one point to another of the earth's surface. He had that in common with them, but nothing else: nothing that bound him to them. (So he told himself, and so truly he thought, for he was comparing a moment of real experience with a series of impressions made on him by his surroundings.) He walked up and down the glittering streets, streaked with white and yellow and green and purple lights, and the commotion in him waxed greater. . . . When he returned to the theater Matilda was gone, and had left no message for him.

He found her in her bed, with the light on, reading. She had undressed hastily and her clothes were littered about the room in an untidiness most unusual with her. She stuffed what she was reading under her pillow.

"You didn't wait for me," he said.

"No. I didn't want to see anybody. I rushed away before the end."

"Anything wrong?"

"I hate the theater. I hate it all, the people in it, the blinding lights, the painted scenery, the audience, oh! the audience! I don't ever want to go near it again. It's just playing and pretending. . . ."

"The piece was certainly nothing but a pretence at drama."

"Oh! Don't talk about it."

"But I want to know what has upset you."

"I can't tell you. I don't know myself. I only know that I'm miserable, miserable. Just let me be."

He had learned that when she was ill or out of sorts or depressed she never had any desire left in her but to curl up and hide herself away. At such times the diffidence inherent in her character seemed wholly to master her, and there was no rousing her to a better grace. He withdrew, his exaltation dampened, and repaired to his study, where in the dark at his desk in the window he sat gazing out into the night, at the few lighted windows of the Inn, and the bruise-colored glow of the sky. He could think only of her and now it seemed to him that he could really lose himself and live in her, and through her come to love. He remembered how, when she was rehearsing, he had asked how she was progressing, and she had replied: "I shall never get it. Either the part's all wrong or I am." And that evening she had "got it," reached what the author had been fumbling after, the authentic note of human utterance, the involuntary expression of love. It had alarmed himself: how devastating must it then have seemed to her! It was almost horrible in its irrelevance. It came from neither of them and yet it was theirs, but not for sharing. It had driven her, like a beast on a stroke of illness, to hide away from him, but through her and only through her could he approach it. The abruptness of its outburst, its geyser-like upward thrust, made it alone seem natural and all their life of habit artificial and shabby; how much more then the stale and outworn tricks of the theater! He approached it, worshiping, marveling at the sense of release in his soul, and knew that, with the power it gave him, he had bitten through the crust of life, whereat he had been nibbling and gnawing with his mind and picking with the chipped flints of philosophies. And he was awed into humility, into admission of his own impotence, into perception, clear and whole, of the immensity of its life's purpose, of its huge force and mighty volume bearing the folly and turbulence of mind and flesh lightly on its bosom, so that a man must accept life as to be lived, can never be its master, but only its honorable servant or its miserable slave. He had then the sense of being one with life, from which nothing was severed, not the smallest bubble of a thought, not the least grain of a desire, of possessing all his force and a boundless reserve of force, and he whispered:

"I love."

And the mighty sound of it filled all the chambers of his life, so that he was rich beyond dreams.

He laid his head in his arms and wept. His tears washed away the stains of memory, the scars and spotted dust upon his soul, and he knew now that he had no longer to deal with an idea of life, but with life itself, and he was filled with the desperate courage of his smallness.

For a brief space after a storm of summer rain the world is a place of glowing color, of flowing, harmonious lines. So it was now with Old Mole, and he discovered the charm of things. His habitual life went on undisturbed, and he could find pleasure even in that. His love for Matilda reduced him to a sort of passiveness, so that he asked nothing of her, gave her of himself only so much as she demanded, and was content to watch her, to be with her, to feel that he was in no way impeding her progress.