Part 18

He was brought to himself by a crash and a tinkle. He had waved his fork in the air and knocked over his last glass of claret. The head waiter concealed his annoyance in fatherly solicitude and professional business, and suggested another half-bottle. Weakly Old Mole consented, and while he was waiting, after collecting his thoughts, found that they had left Panoukian and come to Matilda. Her image was blurred: his love had become sorrow and a creeping torment, and the torment was Matilda, the blood in his veins, inseparable from himself. And because she was inseparable Panoukian became so, too. There could be no gain in thrashing Panoukian: that was just blustering nonsense; "defending his honor" was the phrase. Idiots! He looked round at the other diners. What was the good of defending that which was lost? What was there to defend? You might as well ask a sea captain whose ship had been blown up by a mine why on earth he did not use his guns. . . . Further, honor was a word for which he could find no precise meaning. It was much in vogue in the theater, from Copas to Butcher. A woman's honor apparently meant her chastity. A man's honor, in some very complicated way, seemed to be bound up in the preservation of woman's, as though she herself were to have no say in the matter. No; honor would not do: it was only a red herring trailed across the scent.

Next came the cause of morality, which demanded the punishment of offenders. To his consternation he found himself thinking of the affair impersonally, pharisaically, inhumanly, detaching himself from Matilda, thrusting her violently away, giving her a dig or two with the goad of self-righteousness, and swelling at the neck with conscious rectitude. Why? . . . She must suffer for her sins.

Sin? _Sünde, pécher._ He thought of it in three or four languages, but in all it created an impression of overstatement and, more, of bad taste. He had lived for so long with a warm, intimate idea of Matilda that he resented the intrusion of morality, bidding him stand above her, judge and condemn. It might be simpler, the easiest attitude to adopt--a suit of ready-made mental clothes, reach-me-downs--but it was uncomfortable, cold, and, most astonishing of all, degrading. It was to be impersonal in a desperately personal matter. _Ça ne va pas._

_Du bist wie eine Blume. So rein und schön und hold . . ._

Like nearly every lover who has any acquaintance with the German language, he had tagged Heine's verses on to his beloved. He clutched at them now. They were still apt. He used them as a weapon with which to drive back the cause of morality, but he was still very far from the mastery of himself and the affair--_l'affaire Panoukian._ He was the victim of a fixed idea--the taxicab, the hotel door swinging round, the low-hanging clouds, the Nelson statue. . . . George II had caused the death of Königsmarck, but his sympathies had never been with George II; besides that was a monarch, and not even the success of "Lossie Loses" and his acquaintance with half the Cabinet would enable him with impunity to procure the death of Panoukian. Apart from the defence of honor and the cause of morality, what do men do in the circumstances?

He was to receive instruction. . . .

In the reading room he picked up an evening newspaper. It was pleasant to hold a tangible object in his fingers and to pass into the reported doings of the great and the underworld. He had heard gossip of the final catastrophe of a notoriously wretched marriage. The divorce proceedings were reported in the paper. The husband--Old Mole knew him slightly and did not like him--gave evidence to show himself as a noble and generous creature, near heartbroken, and the woman, whom his selfishness had driven into a desperate love, as light or hysterical. It was such a distortion of the known facts, such an audacious defiance of the knowledge common to all polite London, that Old Mole was staggered. He read the report again. One sentence of the evidence was almost a direct appeal for sympathy. Knowing the man, he could picture him standing there, keeping his halo under his coat-tails and donning it at the right moment. It was theatrical and very adroit.

"Bah!" said Old Mole. "He is groveling to the public, sacrificing even his wife to the many headed."

And his sympathies were with the woman. At least she had shown courage, and the man had lied and asked for admiration for it: so honor was defended and the cause of morality served.

A little knot of men in the room were discussing the case. Their sympathies were with the man.

"If a woman did that to me," said the nearest man, "I'd thrash her, I would. Thank God, I'm a bachelor."

"I don't know what women are coming to," said a fat little man, as cosily tucked into his chair as a hazel nut in its husk. "They seem to think they can do just as they please."

A tall thin man said:

"It all began with the bicycle. Women have never been the same since bicycles came in."

"It wouldn't have been so bad," said the fat little man, "if they'd cut and run."

And Old Mole repeated that sentence to himself.

"What I can't understand is," said the first speaker, who seemed the most indignant, "why he didn't shut her up until she had come to her senses. After all, we are all human, and that is what I should have done. If women won't regard the sacredness of the home, where are we?"

"Surely," said Old Mole, incensed into speaking, "it depends on the home."

"I beg your pardon, sir," retorted the nearest man with some heat. "It does not. In these matters you can't make exceptions. Home is home, and there is no getting away from it. If a woman grows sick of her home it is her own fault and she must stick to it, dree her own weird, as the Scotch say. Destroy the home and society falls to the ground."

And Old Mole, sharpened by argument, replied:

"Society is no more permanent than any other institution. Its existence depends entirely on its power to adapt itself to life. It is certainly independent of the innumerable sentimental ideas with which men endeavor to plaster up the cracks in its walls, among which I must count that of home."

The three men gaped at him. He continued:

"Home, I conceive, has a meaning for children. It is the place in which they grow up. We make homes for our young as the birds make nests for theirs. When the children go forth then the home is empty and is no longer home. Men are no longer patriarchs and no more do they gather the generations under one roof-tree. . . . In the case under discussion there were no children, therefore there was never a home to defend or regard as sacred. Man and woman alike had placed themselves in a false position. What further they had to suffer we do not know. We know that the man took refuge in the closest egoism, and the woman finally in the restless adventure of which we know no more than has been reported to a newspaper by a dull and mechanical shorthand writer. My own view is that, where there are no children, society at large is not interested. Society is only interested in any marriage in so far as it will provide children to ensure its continued existence. Once children are born it is interested to see that they are fed, clothed and educated. (How effectively our present society pursues that interest you may easily observe if you will visit East or South London.) Beyond that its interference, explicit or covert, seems to me to be an unwarrantable intrusion into the privacy of the human soul. No one of us here is in a position to judge of the affair which is the occasion of your argument, and . . . and . . . I beg your pardon for interfering with it."

He rose and passed out the room, leaving three very surprised clubmen behind him. But none of them could be more surprised than himself: surprised and relieved he was. He had been sickened at the idea of a woman being delivered up to the chatter of idle tongues, and in the violence of his distress had come by an absolute certainty that any dignified issue to his present affection could only come through an unprejudiced and unsentimental consideration of the whole facts. It was not going to be easy; but, dear God, he wanted something difficult, something really worth doing to counteract his misery. When he thought of himself and the ache at his heart he was blinded with tears and could see the facts only from one angle--his own.

_Du bist wie eine Blume, So rein und schön und hold . . ._

Seen from that angle, Matilda was reduced in stature, distorted, ugly, mean. But he had loved her, loved her, and must still have the truth of her: more than ever before he needed to understand her. The beauty and delight and youth he had enjoyed in her must not go down in bitterness.

One saying he took away with him from the club:

"It wouldn't have been so bad if they'd cut and run."

Perhaps, he thought to himself, they had "cut and run." And for him it became worse, to think that she had gone, without a word, with never a complaint, just gone. He remembered the night when she had said she was miserable, when he had found her in her bed, after the play, with her room in a litter. And he fell to thinking of the trials he must have put upon her, probing for all the possible offences, secret, subtle, unsuspected, of body and soul that might be laid at his door. There were many that he could think of, but his darkest hours came then when he perceived the fine balance, the perilous poise of married life, the imperceptible dovetailing of interests and habits and humors, the regions beyond perception where souls meet. Its nice complications were almost terrifying: at thousands of points men and women might fail, offend each other, crush each other, destroy, never dreaming of the cause, never, at the time, marking the effect. For such an adventure there need be heroism: to break, when even failure and offence and mutual exasperation bind, strength and courage superhuman or despairing. And men judge! And condemn! They measure this subtlest and most searching relationship with opinions and dull compromise and rules.

He was tortured with the thought of all the injuries he might have done her, and he invented more, invented burdens that he had never put upon her to account for her going away from him, with never a word. For three days he lived in this torment, winding about and about from general to particular and back again by the most circuitous route, a _Rundreise_ with the current morality for Baedeker. And every now and then the obsession would stab home to his heart--the hotel door swinging, the flat infidelity. Once, when the pain was so mortal that he could contain himself no longer, he wrote to her at the hotel. He posted the letter. That was on the second day. On the third he was in an agony. No answer came.

On the fourth day a telegram arrived from the Sussex village and an hour later she, brown, healthy, with a grand swing in her walk, a new depth of bosom, a squarer carriage of the shoulders; a rich bloom on her. She kissed his cheek.

He stared and stared at her. He looked for change in her.

"You!"

"Didn't you get my telegram?"

"Oh! yes."

"I'll take my things off, and we'll have some tea."

She left him. He stood at the head of the little stairs leading down to her apartments, and he trembled and was near weeping. In her room he could hear her singing to herself, happily, blithely as a bird, with a full note that caught at his heart. She seemed to sing no song, but a melody, young and joyous with a full summer gaiety. The sun shone through the staircase window upon his hand where he clutched the balustrade. He was gripping it so tight that the veins stood out and the skin on his knuckles was white. A tear fell on his hand and he looked down at it. It was a plump, podgy, puckered middle-aged hand.

He whisked back into his room as he heard her door open.

They had tea, and he could not take his eyes off her. She thought he looked ill and pulled down. On his desk she saw the pile of his papers.

"You've been writing," she said. "You've been overdoing it. It's never safe to leave a man alone."

"Yes," he replied. "I have written a good deal."

"Is it a story?"

"No. Not exactly a story."

"Is it finished?"

"No. I doubt if it will ever be finished now."

She began to talk of the theater. She had been wired for to resume her part, as her understudy was proving unsatisfactory. Further she had had two offers. One to appear in a new musical comedy, the other of a part in a play to be produced at a little "intellectual" theater for eight matinées. She felt inclined, she said, to accept both. It would mean very hard work, but it would be experience, and it was flattering to be noticed by the superior persons of the stage. And she asked his advice. He thought it might be too much for her to have so much rehearsing and to play in the evening as well. That she brushed aside. She was feeling splendid, strong enough to act a whole play.

"You are becoming a regular Copas," he said.

She laughed; he, too, and they plunged into reminiscences of the old days.

"I sometimes think," he said, "that those were the happiest months of my life."

"Nonsense. There's always more and more in front."

"For you."

She went off into peals of laughter, for she had just remembered the encounter with the prize-fighter. Her sturdy gaiety simply swept him off his feet, and he could only follow in the train of her mood. They made so merry that they lost count of the time, and she suddenly sprang to her feet with a cry and scurried away, dinnerless, not to be late at the theater.

"I ought to have told her," he said to himself. "I ought to have said: 'I know.' . . . But how fine she looked! How happy she must be!"

Happy? There was something in her mood beyond happiness: a zestful strength, a windiness that seemed to blow through every cranny of her soul, whipping the blood in her veins, so that she could not pause for states and conditions of the spirit, nor check herself to avoid unhappiness in herself or others. She was like a ship in full sail, bending to the wind, skimming over tossing seas. She was gallant. She was what he had always hoped she might become. There was in her such a new flood of vitality that he felt ashamed at the thought of bidding her pause to submit to his inquisition. Impossible to check her flight, cruel suddenly to present her with the meanness of what she had done while she was still glowing with its splendor.

He had caught something of her glow, and now he wrestled to break free of rules of conduct and moral codes, and he began, at last, to consider his problem in terms of flesh and blood. There were three points of view to be mastered: three lives knotted together in a tangle and the weakest strand would be broken.

He felt hopeful. There would be a fight for it, and to that he thrilled. He had the exaltation of one on the brink of great discovery.

He went to fetch her from the theater. The stagedoor lay at the back in an alley joining two great thoroughfares. As he entered the alley from one end he saw Matilda and Panoukian leave by the other, and he had his arm in hers. Old Mole turned, with the fluttering sense of an escape, glad not to have met them. And when he had controlled himself he was amused to think that they could not have dreaded the encounter more than he.

He took a long walk to delay his return, and when he reached the chambers they were in darkness. He crept softly down the little stairs and tried her door. It was locked.

In a moment's panic he thought that this time she had really "cut and run," and he was almost stunned with his terror of it. It was too soon, too soon: it would be disastrous; he would be left without understanding, to the mercy of the obsession; he had not all the threads in his hands; until he had, it would be rash folly to snap. He stood against her door, with his ear to the panel, holding his breath, straining to hear. There were explosive noises in the house. From the room he could catch nothing for them. Closer and closer he pressed to the door, his ear against the panel. He lurched and the panel creaked. Silence. He heard her stir in her bed.

She was there! That was all he wanted to know. On tiptoe he crept away. . . . She was there! He would yet gather all the threads and then he or she would snap. One or other would be broken.

What had he then? The evidence of his own eyes. Was that not enough? It was enough for prescribed remedies, to which he could not resort without revenge, for which he had not now the least desire. What his eyes had seen was so isolated, so severed from the rest of his life as to be monstrous and injurious. By itself it was damnable harlotry. (There was a sort of boyish satisfaction in fishing out the words of a grosser age with which to bespatter it and make it even more offensive to pure-mindedness.) But, as he loved the woman, it could not stand by itself. He was in it, too. Actions cannot be judged by themselves. There must have been an antecedent conspiracy of circumstance and fault to lead to such misdemeanor.

With a tight control of himself he could now almost think of it without jealousy (hardly any of that was left but the quick, shallow jealousy of the brute), but he could not think of it without passion, and through that he could discern its inherent passion and, faintly, respond to it. That put an end to all mean suspicions of a conspiracy against himself, or of cowardly contriving to enjoy stolen fruit and leave no trace. . . . She had locked the door against him. So much was definite, and he had a sort of envying admiration for her that she could be precise while he was still floundering and groping for understanding. . . . Certainly he had never seen her so sure of herself.

But then, if she were so sure, why did she not "cut and run." Then it would not be so bad. For a flash he saw the thing with the eyes of a fat clubman; the passion in him ebbed and he lost grip, and blundered into a mist. A lunge forward cleared him. She was sure of herself, so sure that she was giving no thought to her position except as it immediately presented itself. The new factor in her life called for no change, and everything she had was enriched by it, her possessions, her work, even her domestic life. It must all seem to her clear gain, and therefore she was sure. She loved her love, and everything that had led to it, and therefore she was sure.

From that flight upward Old Mole came to the sensation of falling. He was possessed by a prevision, felt that in a moment he would see all things plain, would know exactly what was going to happen. He strained forward, felt sleep overcoming him, struggled against it, and fell asleep.

Then Matilda was busy all day rehearsing, and, during the little time he had with her, she talked the slang and gossip of the theater. Once she asked after the work, and he read a little of it to her, and she liked it and he plucked up courage to go on with it. She laughed at his cuts at women and admitted that he had thrust home at more than one of her own foibles. He had written part of a chapter on the _Theater as Education._ She could make nothing of that. The theater to her was a place in which you played "parts," sometimes good and sometimes bad, and you were always waiting for the supreme, all-conquering "part" to turn up. She did what she was asked to do to the very best of her ability; that was her work and she did not look beyond it. The flattering side of London, its pleasures, fashions and functions had fallen into the background and she gave it just the attention which her interest seemed to demand. It never struck her as strange that she should be given no more of a play than her own part to read, and if she had been given the play would probably not have read it. She learned her part, movements and gestures, cues during rehearsal, and never watched any scene in which she did not appear.

By her part in the "intellectual" play she was mystified. None of her Copas or Butcher tricks were in the least suited to it. She had an enormous part to learn: all talk, gibes at marriage, and honor, and wealth, and domesticity, all the fetishes of the theater in which she was beginning to find her footing. The manager of the theater was his own producer; he had chosen her because she looked the part, "the rising temperament," he called it, and he added to her bewilderment with the invention of elaborate detail to break the flood of talk, and, in the absence of action, to bind the play together. Everyone in that theater spoke of the play with awe, so she concealed her perplexity and brought it to Old Mole.

"There are no scenes in it," she said. "No cues. Nothing you can take hold of. I say my lines: the other people in the play don't seem to take any notice of them, but just go on talking. I suppose it's very clever, but it isn't acting. I don't believe even my uncle could do anything with it."

He recommended her to read the play, and she procured a copy from the author. When she had read it she said:

"I know why nothing happens in it. There isn't a soul in it who cares about anybody else. It's all teasing. They can't do anything else because they don't care. And they have nothing really to talk about, so I suppose that's why they discuss the Poor Law Commission, and the Cat and Mouse Bill, and the Social Evil and all sorts of things I never heard of."

Old Mole read it, and found it clever, amusing, but sterilizing and exhausting, and, in its essence, he could not find that it was very different from "Lossie Loses" or the contrivances of the Butcher repertory. It was just as unimaginative. It had come into existence, not from any spiritual need, but entirely to rebut Butcherdom. Butcherdom shadowed it. The author in writing his play seemed first of all to have thought what would happen in a Butcher entertainment in order to decide on something different. He had not moved from Butcher back to life, but had run from Butcher down a blind alley. And the result was an almost brilliant hotchpotch with a strong savor of hatred and contempt and the tartness of isolation. Contempt for Butcher might be its strongest motive, but alone it could not account for it. Old Mole sought loyally for the best, but could find nothing nobler than the desire for admiration. The author was not scrupulous, nor was he ingenious; his bait for reputation was the ancient and almost infallible trick of measuring his cleverness by the stupidity of others.