Part 19

It lacked theatrical effectiveness and therefore it was impossible to get its meaning or even a drift of it into Matilda's head. She learned her lines like a parrot, delivered them like a parrot--(thoroughly to the satisfaction of the producer)--looked charming in her expensive gowns and attracted the notice of the critics. The author told an interviewer that his play was a masterpiece of its kind, and that Matilda was one of the most remarkable actresses on the English stage. The piece ran for its eight matinées and was then heard of no more, but to Old Mole it had much value. It set him wondering. The stage had nothing to show but the false emotions of Butcherdom and the absence of emotion of the "intellectuals." The theater must express the life of the country or it could not continue to exist, as it indubitably did. There was always a new playhouse being built. Money was poured into the theater through the stagedoor and through the box-office, but its best efforts were shown in childish fancy. It was at its healthiest and least odiously pretentious in the presentation of melodrama, with its rigid and almost idiotic right and wrong, its stupid caricature of the workings of the human heart. If it had a tradition, melodrama was its only representative. The plays of Shakespeare were melodrama in the hands of a man of genius. Without genius the national drama was heavy and lumpish, stolidly clinging to unquestioned and untested values, looking for no higher rewards in life than riches and public esteem.

It was astonishing to Old Mole that he could be so deeply interested in these things. He had expected to be absorbed in his sorrow and the problem of handling it. Then he found that he was testing the two theaters, the Butcherish and the "intellectual," by the passion that had flamed into his heart through his love for Matilda at the moment when it had been outraged. In neither was there a spark to respond to his fire. The Butcher theater was a corpse; the intellectual theater that same corpse turned in its grave. And it amused him to imagine how his case would be handled in them; in the one it would be measured by rule of thumb--the eternal triangle, halo'd husband, weeping wife, discomfited lover, or, if violent effects were sought for, the woman damned to an unending fall, the two men stormily thanking their vain and shallow God they were rid of her; in the other it would be talked out of court, husband and wife would never rise above a snarl, and lover would go on talking; in both men and women would be cut and trimmed to fit in with a formula. In the one the equation would be worked out pat; in the other it would go sprawling on and on like the algebraic muddle of a flurried candidate in an examination who has omitted a symbol and gone on in desperate hope of a result.

Old Mole had discarded formulæ. He was dealing with a thing that had happened. Judgment of it, he said, was futile. The issue of it depended not on himself alone. As its consequences unfolded themselves he must apply the test of passion, grasp and, so far as possible, understand, and let passion burn its way to an outlet.

Familiarity with this mystery, straining on from day to day, soon made it possible for him to accept the surface happenings of life without resentment.

For her part in the musical comedy Matilda took singing and dancing lessons, so that she was out all day and every day. She was to receive a salary twice as large as any she had yet earned, and would be financially independent even though she indulged her extravagance, than which nothing was less probable. In all the working side of her life he took a very comfortable pride. If she was not altogether his creation, at least he had helped her to shape herself, and it was a delight to see her character taking firm lines. And, as he watched her, he thought of the current sentimental prating of motherhood and its joys and its concomitant pity of men debarred from them, the absurdity of the segregation of the sexes: as if love were not in its essence creative; as if it had not begun to create before it reached consciousness; as if men could only take the love of woman, as in a pitcher, to spill it on the ground; as if love were not always beyond giving and taking, reaching out and out to create, lifting half-formed creatures into Being. . . . By the side of the other two theaters the musical comedy stage seemed almost to shine in candor, and he was glad that Matilda--the Matilda of his creation--should pass into it to charm the chuckle-heads out of their dullness.

She passed into it gleefully and he was able to separate her from that other Matilda in whom there was a passion at grips with his. He was certain now that it was passion and no vagary, for, day by day, under her working efficiency, she gained in force, and warmth and stature.

For five weeks Panoukian had made no appearance in Gray's Inn. Then one day he came with a fat Newfoundland puppy, a present for Matilda. She was out. Old Mole received him.

"Hullo!"

"How do! sir."

They stood looking at each other, Old Mole holding the door back, Panoukian hesitating on the threshold with the puppy in his arms.

Old Mole thought:

"I will speak to him. I will tell him what I think of him. I will make him feel what he is."

He said:

"Come in."

"Are you alone?" asked Panoukian.

"Yes. Come in."

They entered Old Mole's study, Panoukian first.

"She said she wanted a dog, so I brought her this."

Panoukian put the puppy on the floor, walked over to the cigarette box and helped himself.

Old Mole opened his mouth to speak, but it was dry and he could make no sound. He ran his tongue over his lips. At last he shot out:

"Panoukian!"

Panoukian was pulling the puppy from under the bookcase. He turned and faced Old Mole with his schoolboy expression of wondering what now might be his guilt. He looked so young that none of the words with which Old Mole was preparing to crush him--scoundrel, traitor, villain, blackguard--was anything but inept. He was just engagingly, refreshingly young; younger than he had ever been, even as a boy. The discontent, the hardness and strain of revolt had faded from his eyes; they were clear and bright. He was as fresh as the morning. Plainly he had no thought beyond the puppy and the pleasure he had hoped to bring with it, and was startled by the harshness of the pedagogic note in Old Mole's exclamation, startled into shyness.

Old Mole's determination crumbled away: his laudable resolve was whisked away from him. He excused himself with this:

"I have no right to speak to him before I have come to an understanding with her."

There was embarrassment between them, the awkwardness of master and pupil. To bridge it he said:

"It is a long time since you have been to see us."

Directly he had said it he knew that he had contributed to their deception, but while he was seeking a means of withdrawal Panoukian pounced on his opportunity and dragged their three-cornered relationship back to the old footing: and Old Mole could not altogether disguise his relief.

"Yes," he said. "I've been so busy. Old Harbottle is running a private ball, and there's been a tremendous lot of work up and down the country."

"Up and down the country," repeated Old Mole.

"Yes. Harbottle's beginning to listen to what I say. I've been giving him some telling questions lately, and he's already cornered the Front Bench twice. . . . The old idiot is beginning to discover the uses of impersonal unpopularity as an instrument of success. He would never have taken the plunge by himself, and he's very grateful to me."

"So you are beginning to do something?"

"You can't do much in politics. I used to think you could. You can't do first-rate things, but I'm beginning to realize that it's a second-rate job." He grinned. "The odd thing is that, since I realized that, I'm getting quite to like old Harbottle. He's second-rate. He doesn't know it, of course, because he hasn't the least notion of what a first-rate man is like. He is perfectly cast-iron second-rate. Most surprising of all is that I am beginning to see that every man has the right to be himself--subject, of course, to every other man's right to kick him for it."

"Eh?"

Old Mole was startled. Tolerance was the last thing he expected from Panoukian; it was entirely out of keeping with his boyishness. He waited for more, but nothing came; and this was the most astonishing of all, for there Panoukian sat, boyish, glistening with youth, enunciating a maxim of tolerance, and actually relishing silence. Panoukian, having nothing more to say, was content to say nothing! . . . It was too bad. Almost it seemed that he had gone through all his misery for nothing. He had striven to master his situation only at every turn to be met with the triumph of the unexpected. He had decided to start by seeing the affair from Matilda's point of view and Panoukian's, and now, ludicrously, maddeningly, they had both changed, and both, apparently, were being intent on showing an amicable front to him. They were--and he writhed at the thought--they were trying to spare his feelings.

An admirable maxim that! Panoukian, of course, had every right to be Panoukian; _ergo,_ if needs must, to change into another Panoukian. The young man's placid, contented, comfortably absorbed silence was exasperating.

"Panoukian!" said Old Mole.

Panoukian groped out of his silence.

"Yes, sir."

(Ludicrously boylike he looked, all wide-eyed, deliberate innocence.)

"There is a passage in Montaigne which, I think, excellently illustrates the observation you made some time ago. It is over there at the end of the bookcase."

Panoukian rose and strolled over to the shelf indicated, his back toward Old Mole, who sprang to his feet, strode, breathing heavily, glared fixedly at the round apex of the angle of Panoukian and lunged out in a lusty kick. The young man pitched forward, righted himself, and swung round, with his hand soothing the coat-tail-covered portion of his body.

"Why the Hell did you do that?" he grunted.

"To illustrate your maxim," said Old Mole, "and also to relieve my feelings."

"If you weren't who you are and what you are," retorted Panoukian sharply, "I should knock you down."

To that Old Mole could not find the apt reply, and once again, ruefully, he was forced to see that he had been betrayed into an absurdity. In that moment he hated Panoukian more than anyone he had ever known. He had been whirled by the unexpectedness of Panoukian into throwing away his one flawless weapon, his dignity, and without it he was powerless. Without it he could not even draw on the prescribed attitudes and remedies for gentlemen in his position. All the same he was thoroughly pleased to have caused Panoukian pain, and hoped he would be forced to take his meals from the mantelpiece for a day or two.

They stood glaring at each other, both wondering what would happen next. Panoukian retired gracefully from the conflict by stooping to pick up the puppy. Old Mole snorted, grabbed his hat, and stumped away and out of the chamber.

The callousness of Panoukian! The effrontery! That he should dare to show his face, and such an unabashed, innocent face! Where was that conscience which makes cowards of us all? . . . At any rate, thought Old Mole, after being kicked Panoukian would not venture to appear again. But was that so sure? Was it so certain that his unpremeditated act of violence would jolt Panoukian's conscience into activity? Having swallowed the indignity of his position, would he not the more easily be able to digest affront and insult and humiliation? How if the kick had not settled the affair Panoukian?

From his own uneasiness and almost shame Old Mole knew that it had not, that possibly it might have only the effect of crystallizing the change of relation between himself and Panoukian, of obliterating the tie of affection, of equalizing matters, of slackening the rein on Panoukian, of releasing him from every other claim upon his affection, except the violent outpouring of love which had swept him into disregard for convention, and honor, and the cause of morality. If there be degradation in violence, it affects the kicker as well as the kicked. Old Mole found himself very near understanding Panoukian. Clearly he had come to the chambers on an impulse. Matilda had desired a dog, he had seen the very dog, and come racing with it. Encountering Old Mole for the first time since the eruption in their affairs, he had carried the scene through with an admirable candor. There was no shiftiness in him, nor slyness: that would have been horrible, the sure indication of a beastly intrigue. No: either Panoukian was so possessed by his emotions, by the joy of what was probably his first full affair of the heart, that he could give no thought either to his own position or Matilda's or her husband's; either that or he was so intent on his passion, so absorbed by it, as to be lifted beyond scruples or thought of impediment, and was tearing away like a bolting horse, regardless of the cart behind or the cart's occupants. In either case Old Mole felt that he had something definite to deal with, genuine feeling and no farded copy of it. And he felt sorry for the kick and wished he could withdraw it.

The very next day Panoukian came to dinner at half-past six. Matilda brought him. They had met by chance in the Strand, and she had persuaded him to come back with her.

The meal was to all appearances like hundreds of others they three had had together. Old Mole sat at the head of the table, with Matilda on one side of him, Panoukian on the other, and he watched them. They did not watch him. They grinned at each other like happy children, and made absurd jokes and teased, and their most ordinary remarks seemed to have a secret and profound meaning for them. Sometimes they explained their references to Old Mole, and then it was always "We"--Panoukian said: "We," Matilda: "Arthur and I" . . . and beneath all their talk there seemed to be a game, but a game in all seriousness, of fitting their personalities together. Every now and then, when they were filled with a bubbling consciousness of their wealth, they would throw a scrap to Old Mole out of sheer lavishness and babyish generosity. But other thought for or of him they had obviously none. They were not embarrassed by his presence, nor, to his amazement, was he by theirs. Only he was distressed, when they threw him a scrap of their happiness, to find that he knew not what to do with it, and could only put it away for analysis.

"I analyze and analyze," he thought, "and there are they with the true gold in their hands, hardly knowing it for precious metal."

Oh, yes! They were in love, and they had no right to be in love, and it was his duty to put an end to it.

But how?

He could only say: "This woman is my wife. I forbid her to explore any region of life which I cannot enter. She has no entity apart from me; her personality can find no food except what I am able or choose to provide for her."

That was impossible, for it was not true.

More humanly he might say:

"I can understand that you love each other. But I cannot condone the selfishness it has led you to, or the secrecy. . . ."

There he stopped. There was no secrecy. They were disguising nothing. They did not tell him because their intimacy was, as yet, so preciously private an affair that it could not bear talking of; and he bowed to that and respected their reticence.

Matilda went to tidy her hair and he was left alone with Panoukian. They could find nothing to say to each other. The minds of both were full of the woman. Without her they fell apart, each into his separate world. And Old Mole knew that the issue of the adventure lay with her, and he knew that Panoukian looked for no issue and was living blindly in the present. He felt sorry for Panoukian.

The evening papers were thrust through the door. Panoukian fetched them and gave them to his host. The largest event of the day was the grave illness of Sir Robert Wherry.

"Dear, dear," said Old Mole.

"I shouldn't have thought he was human enough to be ill," said Panoukian.

"It is ptomaine poisoning, set up by a surfeit of oysters."

"There'll be a terrific funeral. He was the greatest of Harbottlers. He loved the public and his love was requited."

And Old Mole thought of that other Harbottler who had so loved the public that he had trampled his wife in the mud to retain its esteem.

Matilda returned:

"Who's coming to the theater with me?" she said, and her eyes lighted on Panoukian and she gave him a smile more profound, more subtle, more tenderly humorous than any she had ever bestowed on Old Mole. Both men rose. Old Mole reached the door first. With graceful generosity Panoukian bowed, yielded his claim, kissed Matilda's hand, and took them to the door. Old Mole went first. Halfway down the stairs Matilda turned:

"Oh! Arthur," she said, "the puppy's a perfect darling."

As coarse men take to drink, or philandering, or tobacco, to relieve the strain of existence, so Old Mole took to work. His "Out of Bounds" (Liebermann, pp. 453, 7_s._ 6_d._ net) is a long book, but it was written, revised, corrected in proof and published within six months. It was boomed, and lay, unread, on every one's drawing-room table. He received letters about it from many interesting personages, and from his sickbed Robert Wherry gave it his pontifical blessing. The Secretary of State for Education asked Old Mole to dinner, and declared sympathy with the criticism of the prevailing system, but shook his head dubiously over the probability of his department taking any intelligent interest in it.

"I quite agree," he said, "that you ought to get at children through their imaginations, but imagination isn't exactly a conspicuous quality of government departments."

"Then I don't see how you can govern," said Old Mole.

"We don't," said the Secretary of State. "We take orders, like everybody else, but we are in a position to pretend that we are giving them. A government department is a great wheel going round very, very slowly, shedding regulations upon the place beneath. Every now and then, when none of the permanent officials is looking, an intelligent man can slip a real provision into the feeder and trust to luck for its finding the right need and the right place. . . . But it is not often we have the advantage of such thoroughly informed criticism, Mr. Beenham. The country is lamentably little interested in education, considering how much it has suffered from it."

"I have suffered from it."

He was amused by his celebrity. Every little group had a cast for him, but none of their bait attracted him in the least. He preferred to swim in his own waters, leisurely, painfully in the wake of Panoukian and Matilda. They at least knew where they were going, were possessed by an immediate object. Where all the politicians and scribes were looking away from their own lives toward a reorganized society based on a change in humanity, a change not in degree but in kind, Panoukian and Matilda were changing, growing, responding to natural necessity. They were loving, loving themselves, loving life, their bodies, their minds, everything that body and mind could apprehend.

"There is no social problem," said Old Mole, "there is only the moral problem, and that is settled by the act of living, or left in a greater tangle by the refusal to live."

One night as he returned home from a dinner at a literary and artistic club he stood at the head of the little stairs looking down into the darkness. He was filled with regret for the past that had contained so much pleasantness and appalled by the vision of the future stretching on without Matilda, for it would be without her though she stayed under his roof. Between the theater and the other she gave so much that she had very little left for him--so little: gentleness and kindness and consideration, things which it were almost kinder not to give. It were best, he thought, that she should go and make her own life, with or without the other. She had her career, her work: friends she would always make, acquaintances she could always have in abundance. . . . And yet she stayed. He had felt dependent on her for the solution, for the proof, as it were, that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. But she stayed. There must then be something that she treasured in her life with him. . . . And he was curious to know what it might be. Almost before he was aware of it he was down the little stairs and at her door, listening, and he was chilled with pity. She was weeping, and smothering the sound of it.

"Poor child!" he thought.

And he tapped lightly at her door. No sound. Again he tapped. She came then.

"I heard you," he said. "It was more than I could bear."

She led him into her room and made him sit on her bed as she slithered into it again. She would not have the light turned on.

"I couldn't bear you to be unhappy. You have been so happy."

"Yes," she said.

"Do you want to go?" he asked.

"I'm afraid."

At first he thought she meant she was afraid of the tongues of the many, but that fear could be no more than superficial. Hers was deep. It seemed to shake her as an angry wind a tree.

"Well, well," he said.

She reached out in the darkness for his hand. In silence she pressed his hand, and then:

"You never know," she said.

It was all she could tell him, that she was suffering. He said:

"There is nothing to fear," and in silence he pressed her hand.

"You _have_ been good to me."

There was a knell in the words. They were the epitaph of their life together.

"I think," he said, "that, if we were so foolish as to tot up the gains on either side, mine would be the greater."

Again she pressed his hand.

"I'm not a bit like Josephine really, am I?"

"My dear child." He was very near tears. "My dear child, not a bit."

So he left her.

What was she afraid of? His judgment of her? That had come up as a dark rain-heavy cloud. But it had passed without shedding its waters. Now, yielding to the tenderness and pity she had just roused in him, he was led to an inly knowledge of her. She was afraid of her love, afraid of her own devouring absorption in it. (Something of the kind he had known himself, in early days with her.) So she clung to material things, to the existence they had together builded, to his own proven kindness, and, as she clung, only the fiercer burned the flame within her, flickering destruction to everything she cherished. Sooner or later she must yield. He saw that, but also he knew that to precipitate the severance might be forever to condemn her to her dread, so that she would be withered with it. But if, of her own despair, or fierce ecstasy, or sudden illumination of the inmost friendliness of what she feared, came surrender, then would she win through to the ways of brightness, and be mistress of her own life and love. He had passed his own alternative, an easy choice; he could see on to hers, a more grinding test. He shuddered for her, and, knowing its peril, made no move to help.

Often he would absent himself from the chambers for days together. The atmosphere was too explosive, the strain too great. She would see him to the door and kiss his cheek, and her eyes would say:

"Perhaps I shall be gone when you come back. You understand?"

And he would turn his eyes away because they said too much.

But she did not go.

For many weeks she did not see her lover. Old Mole knew that because she was home earlier from the theater and was rarely out in the afternoon, and spent much time in writing--she who could never write without an effort--letters, the charred fragments of which he found in the hearth. Then she was restless and frantically busy:

Ruefully he would think:

"Idiots! They are trying to give it up for me."