Part 17

She showed no change save that there was a sort of effort in her self-control, as though she were deliberately maintaining her old attitude toward him. She never made any further allusion to her avowed hatred of the theater, and returned to it as though nothing had suffered. He told himself that it was perhaps only a mood of exhaustion, or that, though she might have passed through a crisis, yet it was possible for her to be unaware of it, so that its effects would only gradually become visible and very slowly translated into action. After all, she was still very young, and the young are mercifully spared having to face their crises. . . . When he went to see her play her part again she had mastered her scene by artistry; the almost barbaric splendor of her outburst was gone; she had a trick for it, and her little scene became, as it was intended to be, only a cog in the elaborate machinery by which the entertainment moved.

This time Panoukian was with him, and denounced the piece as an abomination, a fraud upon the public--(who liked it immensely)--and he produced a very ingenious, subtle diagnosis of the diseases that were upon it and submitted it to a thorough and brutal vivisection, act by act, as they sat through it. Old Mole was astonished to find that Panoukian's violence annoyed him, offended him as an injustice, and, though he did not tell him so, saw clearly that he was applying to the piece a standard which had never for one moment been in the mind of the author, whose concern had been to the best of his no great powers to contrive an amusing traffic which should please everybody and offend none, supply the leading actors with good and intrinsically flattering parts, tickle the public into paying for its long-continued presentation, and so pay the rent of the theater, the formidable salary list, and provide for the satisfaction of his pleasures, the caprices of his extremely expensive wife, and his by no means peculiar mania for appearing in the columns of the newspapers and illustrated journals; pure Harbottling; but it had nothing at all to do with what Panoukian was talking about, namely, art. It was certainly all out of drawing and its moral perspective was all awry, but it was hardly more fantastical and disproportionate than Panoukian's criticism. It was entirely unimportant: to apply a serious standard to it was to raise it to a level in the mind to which it had no right. Of the two, the author and Panoukian, he was not sure but Panoukian was the greater fool. However, extending his indulgence from one to the other, he let the young man talk his fill, and said nothing. He had begun to treasure silence.

He loved the silent evenings in Gray's Inn, where he could sit and smoke and chuckle over the world's absurdity, and ponder the ways of men so variously revealed to him in the last few years, and gloat over his own happiness and dream of the days when Matilda should have come to the full bloom of her nature and they would perfectly understand each other, and then life would be a full creation, as full and varied, as largely moving as the passing of the seasons. He had delightful dreams of the time when she would fully share his silence, the immense region beyond words. He was full of happiness, gummy with it, like a plum ripe for plucking--or falling.

In his fullness of living--the very top, he told himself, of his age, of a man's life--he found it easy to cover paper with his thoughts and memories, delightful and easy to mold them into form, and to amuse himself he began a work which he called "Out of Bounds," half treatise, half satire on education, dry, humorous, mocking, in which he drew a picture of the members of his old profession engaged in hacking down the imaginations of children and feeding the barren stumps of their minds with the sawdust of the conventional curricula. He was very zestful in this employment, perfectly content that Matilda should be even less demonstrative than before, telling himself that she was wrestling with the after effects of her crisis and would turn to him and his affection when she needed them. He made rapid progress with his work.

"Lossie Loses" came to an end at last, and he counted the spoils. He had gained many thousands of pounds--(the play was still running in America)--a few amusing acquaintances, a career for his wife, and an insight into the workings of London's work and pleasure which he would have found it hard to come by otherwise. He chuckled over it all and flung himself with fresh ardor into his work.

After the hundredth performance of her play Matilda declared that she was tired, and wanted a rest, and she threw up her part. She came to him and said she wished to go away.

"Very well. Where shall we go?"

"I want to go alone."

And she waited as though she expected a protest from him. For a moment she gazed at him almost with pleading in her eyes, and then she governed herself, stood before him almost assertively and repeated:

"Alone."

In the aggression he felt the strain in her and told himself she was wanting to get away from him, to break the habit of their life, to come back to him fresh, to advance toward him, reach up to the prize he held in his hands. He told himself that to break in upon her diffidence might only be to thicken the wall she--(he said it was she)--had raised between them. He said:

"Won't you mind?"

"No. I want to be alone."

"Where will you go then?"

"I don't know. Anywhere. By the sea, I think."

He suggested the Yorkshire coast, but she said that was too far and she didn't like the North.

"Oh! No!" he said. "Want to forget it?"

She passed that by.

He took down a map, and she looked along the south coast and pitched on a place in Sussex, because it was far from the railway and would therefore be quiet. He left his work, wired to the hotel for rooms, sat and talked to her as she packed, saw her off the next morning and returned to his work, rejoicing in the silence and emptiness of the chambers.

He sent her letters on to her without particularly noticing their superscription. On the third day a letter came for her, and he recognized the handwriting as Panoukian's. He sent that on. When his work went swimmingly and his pen raced he wrote to her, long, droll, affectionate epistles: when his work hobbled then he did not write and hardly gave a thought to her. She wrote to him in her awkward hand with gauche, conventional descriptions of the scenery amid which she was living. He read them and they gave him fresh light on education. He was reaching the constructive part of his work, and it began to take shape as an exposition of the methods by which the essential Matilda might have been freed of the diffidence and self-distrust which hemmed her in. That brought him to feminism, and he imagined a description of women in Trafalgar Square screaming in a shrill eloquence for deliverance from the captivity into which they had been cast by the morals of the sand heap. He was keenly interested in this scene, and, as he had sketched it, was not sure that he had the topography of the Square exact.

One evening, therefore, he dined at his club, meaning to walk home by the Square and the Strand. He was drawn into an argument and did not set out before ten o'clock. It was one of those nights when heavy clouds lumber low over the city and absorb the light, break the chain of it so that the great arcs are like dotted lanterns, and behind them buildings loom. He turned down Parliament Street to get the full effect of this across the Square, and then came up across and across it, carefully observing how the great thoroughfares lay in relation to the Nelson Column. As, finally, he was crossing to the Strand he was almost dashed over by a taxicab, drew back, looked up, saw his wife gazing startled out of the window. He stared at her, but she did not recognize him and seemed to be entirely absorbed in the fright and shock of the avoided accident. He followed the car with his eyes. It had turned sharply in the middle of the road to pass into the southward stream of traffic. He saw it slow down and draw up outside a huge hotel, and hurried after it. The porter came out and opened the door. Matilda stepped to the pavement, and after her Panoukian. They passed in through the revolving door of the hotel just as he reached the pavement. The porter staggered in with Matilda's portmanteau.

Old Mole lunged forward on an impulse. He reached the door and glared through the glass. The hall was full of people, there was a great coming and going. He could see neither Matilda nor Panoukian. He turned and walked very slowly down the steps of the hotel. There were four steps. He reached the pavement and was very careful not to walk on the cracks. At the edge of the pavement he stopped and stared vacantly up at the Nelson Column. Small and black against the heavy clouds stood the statue, and almost with a click Old Mole's brain began to think again, mechanically, tick-tocking like a clock, fastening on the object before his eyes, and clothing it with associations.

"Nelson--Romney--Lady Hamilton--Lady Hamilton--Emma--Nelson's enchantress--Nelson," and so on all over again. . . . The action of his heart was barely perceptible, a slow beat, a buzzing at his ears. "Nelson--Romney----"

He stood gazing up at the statue. The clouds behind it moved and gave it the appearance of moving. It was very certain that the sword moved. . . . "England expects. . . ." He gazed fascinated. A little crowd gathered. Men and women stood around and behind him and gazed up. He was aware of them, and he said:

"Idiots."

But he could not move. The crowd spread over the pavement and blocked the way. A policeman appeared and moved them on. He jostled Old Mole.

"Move on, there. You're causing an obstruction."

Old Mole stared at him stupidly.

The officer spoke to him again, but made no impression. Old Mole stared at the hotel as though he were trying to remember something about it, but he did not move. The officer hailed a taxi, bundled him into it, and drove with him to the police station. In the charge room there was confabulation, and Old Mole gaped round him: the furniture, the large men in uniform swam mistily before him. One of the men approached him sympathetically, and he heard a voice say:

"Can't make nothink of it, sir."

His brain fastened on that as expressing something that it was trying to get clear. He felt a slight relaxation of the numbness that was upon him.

Another voice said:

"What's your name?"

"Name?" said Old Mole.

The man in front of him said:

"The Inspector says: What's the name?"

"Panoukian," said Old Mole.

VI

OUT OF IT

_When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing._

THE QUEEN OF HEARTS

VI

OUT OF IT

THE name acted as an aperitive on Old Mole's faculties, he opened his eyes and mouth very wide and ate his breath like a fish, and began eloquently to apologize to the policemen for the trouble he had given them. He diagnosed his condition as a brief suspension of the reasoning faculties, a perfectly normal affliction to which all men were liable. The policemen listened to him stolidly and exchanged slow, heavy winks, as to say that they had indeed drawn a strange fish out of the sea of London. Their prize was soon able to give a coherent account of himself, and they let him go with no worse than a request to pay the cost of the cab in which he had been brought.

There was heavy rain when he reached the streets. The people were coming out of the theaters and halls, scurrying along under umbrellas, darting for cover, wrestling their way into cabs and omnibuses and Tube stations. The streets were like black mirrors, or deep sluggish rivers, with the lights drowned in them. The people were all hurrying to get out of the rain. Old Mole was indifferent to it, and more acutely than ever was he visited by the sense of having nothing in common with them. By sheer force of numbers they presented themselves to his mind as obscene. At one point he was caught in a crowd and so offended by the smell of warm flesh, wet clothes and heated india rubber that he was for a moment possessed by a desire to strike the nearest man. He restrained himself and walked on. In front of him there were a brace of marketable women profiting by the weather to display their legs up to their knees. His mind raced back to the Puritanism in which he had been nurtured, and he was filled with the Antonine heated horror of women. . . . All the way home he was beset with sights and scenes that accentuated his disgust.

It was not until he reached Gray's Inn that he was faced with the pathetic absurdity of his situation, and then he found it unthinkable. There was not an object in the chambers but cried aloud of Matilda. She had made the place beautiful, changed its tone from masculine to feminine, and she was there though she was absent. It was very grim and horrible; like coming on the clothes of a beloved creature of whose death he had been told. He played with the idea of death voluptuously. She was dead, he told himself; his own end was not far off. The shadow of it was over the place. He went from room to room, fingering her possessions, touching the stuffs and garments he had last seen in her hands. He opened her wardrobe and thrust his hands among her soft gowns. He stood by her bed and patted the pillow and smoothed the coverlet. He caught sight of himself in her mirror and told himself that he could see her face, too. And she was very young, too young to be dead: and he was startlingly, haggardly old. Surely the end could not be far off.

He went from room to room, picturing her in each as he had last seen her.

He pushed his mood of horror to its extremity so that he was nigh sick with it.

All night in his study he prowled round and round. He locked himself in, locked the outer door, locked all her rooms and pocketed the keys. She would not, she should not, come back. No one should enter. The obscenity of the streets clung to him and he could see his situation in no other light. All his life he had regarded the violation of marriage as a thing so horrible that it could only happen among monsters and therefore so remote from himself as to find no place in his calculations. There was a certain side of human life which was settled by marriage. Outside it was obscenity, from the poison of which marriages were impregnably walled in. The walls were broken down; a filthy flood swamped the fair city of his dreams, and for a short while he was near mad with thoughts of lust and jealousy and revenge. He knew it but could not away with it. There was an extraordinary pleasure, a giddy delight in yielding to the flood, giving rein to the long penned up forces of the animal in him, and breaking into childish, impotent anger.

Slowly he lingered, and he began to imagine, to invent, what others would think of him--Robert, his sister, his acquaintances at the club, and there was a sort of pleasure in the writhing of his vanity. He despised himself for it, but he wallowed in it. Never before had he seen such a quantity of mud and its appeal was irresistible.

When at last he crawled out of it he sat in rueful contemplation of himself and went back to the cause of it all: the averted accident in Trafalgar Square, the hotel door swinging--the low-hanging clouds, the crowd, the Nelson statue. . . . Nelson: Emma. And Old Mole laughed: after all, there were distinguished precedents, Sir William Hamilton, most of the friends of Julius Cæsar, Hans von Bülow, George II. The thing had happened even in Thrigsby, but there it had been only a tale to laugh at, with pitying condemnation for the husband and a sudden, irrepressible envy of the lover; envy, neither more nor less; he felt gratified at the honesty of this admission, though not a little surprised at it. It was like a thin trickle of cold water upon his fever, invigorating him, so that he struggled to break through the meshes of sentimentality in which he had been caught. He broke free, and to his astonishment found himself sitting at his desk and turning over the closely written sheet which he had left on the blotting pad. He corrected a serious mistake in the topography of Trafalgar Square and went on writing. . . . The outcry of the women against the moral atmosphere of the sand heap reached up to a noble eloquence in which were declared their profound pity and sympathy for the men trapped in sensuality and habitual vice. They declared their ability to think of men as suffering human beings, wounded and deformed by ignorance and prejudice, and asked only for the like true chivalry from men. He drained the vat of his ideas dry, and, at last, at five o'clock in the morning, exhausted, he went to bed.

He awoke to a sense of novelty and unfamiliarity in his surroundings and in himself, welcomed the new day with the thankfulness of health, splashed lustily in his bath, jovially slapped his belly as he dried himself, and chuckled at its rotundity, regarded it as a joke, the private particular joke of middle age. Almost it seemed as though his body had a separate personality of its own, certainly it had many adventures, many inward happenings of which he was not aware, a variety of processes beyond his discernment. That amused him mightily. . . . He remembered the horrors of the night. It must have been a nightmare! Of course, a nightmare was often followed with a feeling of health and a grotesque humor!

There were three letters on his breakfast table. One was from Matilda, posted the day before at the Sussex village. She said she was well, though the weather was bad, and she was getting rather more loneliness than she had bargained for. She sent her love and hoped he was happy without her. He tore up the letter and burned it, and turned back the thoughts and memories it had summoned forth. He applied himself hungrily to his breakfast and took careful note of the process of eating, trying to discover why it should be pleasant and why, slowly, it should take the zest off his appetite for the day's doings.

"Queer," he thought, "how little interest we take in the body. It might be an unfailing source of entertainment. It is not so certain neither that it is not wiser than the mind."

All day he harped on thoughts of the body and was fiercely busy scrubbing his own clean of the base ideas of the night. He was fairly rid of them at last toward evening, but his mind was in a horrid confusion, and he was rather alarmed at the hard appearance of actuality taken on by his body. It blotted everything else out. He saw it in the masked light and shade of dirt and cleanliness. From that he went on to the other seeming opposites--life and death, love and hate, vice and virtue, light and darkness--found so many of them that he was semi-hypnotized and sank into an unthinking contemplation. There was good and there was bad, two points, in the catenary of which he was slung as in a hammock, with the void beneath. . . . Life as an exact equation was an impossible, appalling idea; but he could not break free from it. He could not escape from the trite dualism of things. . . . From the stupor of ideas he returned to his body and found in that the same tyranny of the number two: he had two eyes, two ears, two hands, two feet, two lungs, two kidneys. It comforted him greatly to reflect that he had only one heart, one nose, one mouth.

"Bah!" he said, "I am making a bogey of my own shadow."

And he resolved to take a Turkish bath before dining at the club. He did so, and was baked and kneaded and pummeled and lathered back into a tolerable humor, and, as he lay swathed in warm towels and smoking an excellent cigar, he faced the situation, yielded to it, let it sting and nip at his heart, and was so racked with its pain that he could form no clear idea of it, nor struggle, but only lie limp and pray to God, or whatever devil had let such furies loose upon him, that the worst might soon be over before he was betrayed into any brutal or foolish act. He was amazed to find that his vanity had been slain: it had died in the night of shock, so he diagnosed it. No longer was he concerned with what other people would think of himself. The cruel pain twinged the sharper for it, and he saw that vanity is a protective crust, a shell grown by man to cover his nakedness. . . . His general ideas were clear enough: and the amusement of them served to distract him in his agony. It tickled him to think of a Turkish bath in Jermyn Street as the scene of such a mighty sorrow, and said:

"So much the better for the Turkish bath. It becomes the equal of Troy or Elsinore or the palace of Andromache, and nobler, for mine is a real and no poet's tragedy. It is a true tragedy, or, my vanity being dead, I should not bother my head about it. . . . Is my vanity dead? I have shed it as a crab his claw or a lizard his tail. It will grow again."

He sank deep into pain until it seemed to him he could suffer no more, and then he went over to his club and dined fastidiously--a crab (to inspect its claw), a quail, and a devil on horseback, with a bottle of claret, very deliberately selected in consultation with the head waiter. Throughout his meal he read the wine list from cover to cover and back again, and thought how closely it resembled the Thrigsby school list. It contained so many familiar names that he was put out at its not including Panoukian's, and of Panoukian slowly he began to think: at first sleepily and in the gross content of his good dinner, as a wine, heady, sparkling, inclined to rawness, too soon bottled, or too soon uncorked, he could not be certain which. Then he thought of Panoukian as a man, and a savage anger burst in upon him, and he thought of Panoukian's deed as the atmosphere of the club dictated he should think of it. Panoukian had acted dirtily and dishonorably: he should be hounded out, hounded out. Panoukian had wormed himself into his (Old Mole's) affections and trust, to betray both. He had shown himself a cad, a blackguard, a breaker of the laws of hospitality and good society. . . . There was a solid plumpness in this conception of Panoukian that pleased Old Mole almost sensually, gave him the same sort of mouth-watering anticipation as the breast had done of the quail he had just eaten. He had Panoukian nicely dished up, brown, done to a turn: he would poise the knife for one gloating moment, plunge it in, and cleave the ripe morsel from breast to back. Panoukian had been cooked by his own actions: he deserved the knife and the crunch of teeth. Old Mole, like many another good man wronged, felt ogreish. . . . He began in his head (and with the aid of the wine in his head) to compose letters to Panoukian, commencing "Sir" or "Dear Sir," or, without approach, plunging into such a sentence as: "No matter how public the place, or how painful to myself, I shall, when I next meet you, be obliged to thrash you."

And he gloated over the thoughts of thrashing Panoukian: mentally chose the stick, a whippy cane; the fleshy portion of Panoukian's anatomy under the tails of his too-much-waisted coat. He rejoiced in the scene. It might be in the House, under the eyes of all the Harbottles: or, better still, in the Temple before the grinning porters.