Part 20

What if they did give it up? He began excitedly to persuade himself that they would redeem their fault, find nobility in self-sacrifice. But that would not do. He was too wary a guardian of his egoism. That would not do. They had nothing to gain from it. They could give him back nothing. They had taken nothing from him. What she had been to her lover was something which she had never been, never could be, to him. . . . That was how he now phrased it to himself. His love had fashioned her, shaped her, made her lovely: it had needed another love to breathe life into her. And, warming into life, she was afraid of life.

He saw Panoukian in the street. Lean the young man was, and drawn, and pale, prowling: a figure of thin hunger, famished and desperate. He saw Old Mole and swerved to avoid him, but he was not quick enough, and his arm was squeezed with a timid friendliness. He gave a nervous start, butted forward with his head and snarled:

"Go to Hell!"

And he broke away and wriggled like an eel into the crowd.

"God help us!" said Old Mole, "for we are making pitiable fools of ourselves. The vulgar snap and quarrel would be better than this. . . . No, it would not."

It was painfully amusing to him to see Matilda's face in the picture-postcard shops. The photographers had touched her up into a toothy popular beauty, blank, expressionless, fatuous. It was the woman's face with the woman painted out: just a mask, signifying nothing, never a thought, never a feeling, never a desire, and not a spark of will. To thousands of young men it would serve as an ideal of womanhood, and they would slop their calfish emotions over it; they would go to see her in the theater, covet her with mealy lasciviousness. What a filthy business was the theater! He wished to God he had never let her enter it, and told himself things would have been very different then. But would they? What had he given her to hold her? What ultimately had he given her? Tenderness and little kindnesses, indulgence and fondling: but those were only so many trinkets, little flowers plucked in the hedgerows and passed to the fair companion. But finally, finally, what had he given her? And bitterly he said:

"Instruction. . . . A damned ugly word."

She had been his pupil, he her master. At every step he had instructed her, not tritely as a Mr. Barlow, but he had been Barlowish, and that was bad. He had never admitted her to equality. How could he? He had never admitted himself to equality with his inmost self. He had always, as it were, instructed himself, set out upon the crowded way of life with mnemonic precepts, and gathered more and more of them, so that he had never, after childhood, drawn upon his innate knowledge, that was more than knowledge. Without its use his life had, for convenience, been split up into parts more and more, with passing years, at variance with each other. And when the time came to give his life he was no longer master of it. He could lend this and that and the other part; lend, in usury, for only a life can be given. . . . He had brought her to suffering: the much he had given her, the pleasantness and ease, making her only the more intimately feel her need of the more he might have given. He had brought her to suffering and through her suffering he was beginning to learn.

When he thought of her suffering he was tempted to say to her--perhaps not in words--"You will not go. I will. I will leave you free." But that would be to lay her under another obligation, and once more to instruct. The thing was beyond good and evil now: they three were passing through the inmost fire of life. Absurdly he thought of the three Hebrews of the Bible and of an old rhyme his nurse had been used to gabble at him and Robert when they were little boys:

_Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, Shake the bed, Make the bed, And into bed you go._

For a moment or two, like a proper Englishman, he sighed for the happy state of childhood. Then he shook that off.

"Bah!" he said. "We sacrifice the whole of our lives to the ideas implanted in us during the first foolish years of them."

Sir Robert Wherry lay adying. He had never been able to resist an obituary. Never an illustrious man died but Wherry rushed into print, preferably in the _Times_ newspaper, with reminiscence and lamentation. So, as he lay adying, he composed many obituaries of himself. There were reporters at his door waiting upon his utterances. They came as regularly as the bulletins. As each might be his last, it was carefully framed to rival Goethe's or Nelson's or the Earl of Chatham's final words. Three of them began: "We men of England . . ." one "My mother said . . ." two with the word "Love . . ." and once, remembering William Blake, he raised his head and prated of angels. Last, with the true inspiration of death, faithful to himself and the work of his life, he turned and smiled at his nurse and his wife and daughter and said: "Give my love to my public." So he died, and there were tears in thousands of British homes that night.

His death crowded every other topic to the back pages of the newspapers. There were columns of anecdotes and every day brought a fresh flood of tributes from divines, lecturers, novelists, dramatists, publicists of all kinds. One newspaper sent this reply-paid telegram to Old Mole:

_Please send thirty-six words on Wherry._

Having no other use for the printed form, Old Mole filled it in thus:

_He sold sugar.--Beenham._

His tribute was not printed.

There arose a mighty quarrel as to whether or no Wherry should be buried in Westminster Abbey. The Poets' Corner was crowded. Only an indubitable immortal should have the privilege of resting his bones there. The voices of the nation stormed in argument. Were the works of Wherry literature? Men of acknowledged greatness had found (comparatively) obscure graves. Was there not a risk? . . . There was no risk, said the other side. The heart of the nation had been moved by Wherry, the life of the Empire had been made sweeter because Wherry had lived and written.

Lady Wherry was consulted. A picture of her appeared, with a black-edged handkerchief in front of her face, in the illustrated morning papers. And under it was printed her historic reply:

"Bury him by all means----"

Emotion cut short her words.

The argument was finally taken for decision to high places. Those in them had read the works of Wherry and, like the smallest servant in a suburban garret, had been moved to tears by them.

It was arranged. The Dean and Chapter bowed to the decision.

There was to be a procession. All the celebrities were invited, and, as one of them, Old Mole was included. None was omitted. Never a man who had so much as thrust his nose into the limelight was left out.

In the music-halls it was announced on the kinematograph screens that special films would be presented of the funeral of Sir Robert Wherry, and the audiences applauded.

Old Mole was in the forty-fifth carriage, with Sir Henry Butcher and the actress who had created "Lossie," now an actress-manageress. There were kinematograph operators at every street corner, and Tipton Mudde, the aviator, had received a special dispensation from the Home Secretary allowing him to fly to and fro above the procession and to drop black rosettes into the streets.

It was a wet day.

In the Abbey Old Mole was placed in the north transept, and he sat gazing up into the high, mysterious roof where the music of the great organ rolled and muttered. Chopin's Dead March was played and Sir Henry Butcher muttered:

"There comes the bloody heart-tear."

An anthem was sung. Wherry's (and Gladstone's) favorite hymn, "O God, our help in ages past." Apparently there was some delay, for another hymn was sung before the pallbearers and the private mourners came creeping up the nave.

There was silence. The Psalms were sung.

Old Mole heard a reedy, pleasant voice:

". . . For this corruptible must put on incorruption and this mortal shall put on immortality: then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? . . ."

Behind him he heard a droning voice:

". . . A solemn and impressive ceremony. There'll be sermons preached on it on Sunday. We have offered a prize for the best sermon in my paper, 'People and Books.' It was in 'People and Books' that Robert Wherry was first discovered to be a great man. We printed his first serial. I never thought he would reach the heights he did. . . ."

The reedy voice was raised in a toasty fullness:

"Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, as a flower: he fleeth as it were a shadow and never continueth in one stay."

Through the words came the droning voice:

"He was slow in the beginning. He had doubts and was fool enough to want to plague the public with them. The public wants certainties. It wants winners. I told him that he might have doubts, but they were his own private affair and that it was foolish to commit them to writing. I had ado to make him heed me, but he did heed me, and he got so that he couldn't fail. It wasn't in him to fail. He could think just the exact nothing that the public thinks a month or two before they begin to think it themselves. He was fine for religion and home life and young love and all that, but you had to keep him off any serious subject. He knew that, after a time. He knew himself very well, and he would take infinite trouble. He had no real sense of humor, but he learned how to make jokes,--little, sly jokes they were, shy things as though they were never sure of being quite funny enough. It took him years to do it, but he could do it. There've been a million and a half of his books sold. We'll sell fifty thousand this week. . . . Man! I tell ye, I've had a hard fight for it. I've had thirty press agents up and down the country, working day and night, sending in stuff from the moment he was ill. I was with him when he ate the oysters. I had sick moments when I thought the newspapers weren't going to take it up. I put the proposition to the kinematograph people and their interest carried it through. It was a near thing. The Dean hadn't read the man's works. I had to find some one above the Dean who had. . . . I helped to make Robert Wherry what he was. I couldn't, in decency, fail to give my services to his fame and procure him the crowning glory of . . ."

Old Mole, straining forward, heard the reedy voice:

". . . We give Thee hearty thanks for that it hath pleased Thee to deliver this our brother out of the miseries of this sinful world. . . ."

Sick at heart, Old Mole edged into the aisle and crept out into the air, gratefully drawing in great breaths of it, and thanking the Lord for His mercy in leaving the sky above London and suffering the winds to blow through it and the rain to fall upon it.

In his chambers he found a thin brown man, grave and dignified and dried by the sun.

"You don't know me, Mr. Beenham?" he said.

Old Mole scanned him.

"No. I can't say I do."

"Cuthbert Jones. You may remember. . . ."

Carlton Timmis!

"Sit down, sit down," said Old Mole. "I _am_ glad to see you. I wrote to you, wired to you at a place called Crown Imperial."

"A dirty hole."

"You heard about your play?"

"Only six weeks ago. In Shanghai. I picked up an old illustrated paper. There was a portrait of Miss Burn in it. I hear she is a success. . . . I was told there is a company touring the China coast with the play."

"It is still being performed," said Old Mole. "It has been translated into German, French, Italian, Russian, Hungarian, Dutch, Japanese. . . ."

"Not into Chinese, I hope."

"Why not?"

"Because I live in China."

"You haven't come back, then?"

"To see my father, that is all. As soon as he heard I was thousands of miles away nothing would satisfy him but I must come and see him. He is very ill, I believe, and as I grow older I find that I like to think of him and am, indeed, fond of him. I want to hear him talk Edinburgh philosophy again."

"Your play, up to date, has made sixty-four thousand pounds."

The brown man sat up in his chair and laughed.

"It has all been carefully invested and will very soon have grown into seventy thousand. I have had the use of it for two years. I propose now that we go over to the bank and execute a transfer."

"No, thank you."

"No? You must. You must."

"No, thank you. I have brought home three hundred pounds to support my father in his old age. I require nothing for myself. I am perfectly happy. I am a teacher of English in a Chinese government school two hundred miles from the railway, with no telegraph or telephone. I have a wife, a Chinese, who is a marvelous housekeeper, a most admirable mother, as stupid as a cow, and she resolutely refuses to learn English. I have not been able altogether to shake off my interest in the theater, but the traveling Children of the Pear-tree Garden give me greater pleasure than I ever had from any English company in or out of the West End. They are sincere. They are rascals, but they love their work. . . ."

"But the play, and the----"

". . . Money. . . . If I were you, Mr. Mole, I should drop it over Waterloo Bridge. I came today to return you your fifty pounds, for which I can never be sufficiently grateful. I am glad--and sorry--that you have been repaid so plentifully."

He could not be prevailed on to take a penny, and presently they stopped arguing about it, and Timmis instructed Old Mole in the ways of the Chinese, how they were a wise people who prized leisure above all things, and so ordered their lives as to preserve the simplicity of the soul, without which, it is clear, the brain must be overwrought and dislocated through its vain efforts to do the work of the mind. He drew such a charming picture of Chinese life that Old Mole, with the folly of London etched upon his brain, could not but applaud his decision to return. They talked of many things and wagged their heads over the strange chances of life, and they parted the richer by each other's respect and admiration and friendly wishes.

And Old Mole returned to the strain of his existence. Impossible, he thought, to stay in London. Equally impossible to retain so huge a sum of money. It would go on swelling like a tumor, and, like a tumor, it would create a stoppage either in his own life or in someone's else. Had it not already done so? Had it not played its part in the tragi-comedy that was not yet come to its climax? Had it not raised him to an absurd height, blown him out into a caricature of himself, pulled out his nose, goggled his eyes, given him a hunch back and a pot belly, forced him into overfeeding, overdrinking, over-talking, into writing a ridiculous, pontifical, instructive book, choked his humor and played the very devil with his imagination? He pondered this question of the money and at last he had an inspiration. He went down over Blackfriars Bridge and into the slums of Southwark. In a foul street he called at a house and asked how many people there might be living in it. He was told twenty-three: four families. In another there were thirty-one. In another he was asked in by the woman, and there was a corpse on the bed, and there were three children eating bread and jam for their dinner on the table only a yard from it, and the woman was clearly going to have another child. He asked the name of the landlord of that house, and next day sought him out. He bought the house: he went on buying until he had the whole row, then the whole street, then the next street and the next, and the next, until his money was all gone but ten thousand pounds. Then he gave orders for all the foul houses to be pulled down and a garden to be made. . . . He was told that it would be impossible--that he would have to get permission from the Borough Council, and the County Council, and Parliament.

"Can't I do what I like with my own?" he said.

"It's a question," said the rent collector who had taken him under his wing, "whether the Council can afford to do without the rates. If you pull the houses down, sir, you'll only make the overcrowding worse, because they must live somewhere, sir, and, bless you, they don't mind it. They're born in it and they die in it. You and I, sir, don't like the smell, but they don't never notice it."

But Old Mole stuck to it and the houses were pulled down and a garden was made, and he said not a word about it to a soul. It was only a very little garden because, though he had bought many houses, he could not buy the land on which all of them were built because it was very dear.

Almost best of all he liked the destructive part of the undertaking. Pulling down houses was in his mood and sorted with his circumstances. From his own house he had set his face.

He had received a letter from Panoukian:

"DEAR SIR,--You have eyes in your head and must have seen what I have been at no pains to conceal from you. I have lived through weeks of torture now and would live through many more if there were anything to be gained. I have been led to write this by the enclosed letter, which I can show you, I think, without betrayal. _Ich kann nicht mehr._ . . . This may be a shock to you, no doubt it will cause you much pain, but I believe you have the humanity to attempt to understand and to believe me when I say that I was never, in my heart, more your friend than I am now. I think it is for you to help in so much suffering."

The enclosed letter was from Matilda. Old Mole's eye clouded as he read it:

"My dear, I can't let you go. I can't, I can't. I've tried so hard, I have. It isn't wrong to love like that. I can think of nothing else. He's been so kind, too. But I'm spoiling your life. I can love you, my dear, but I'm not the woman you ought to have. I can love you, my dear, but I'm not young and sweet like you ought to have. All this thinking and suffering has made me hard in my heart, I think. There's such a lot between me and you, my dear. I could fight through it with you, but that would be so hard on you. It's not as if he was a bad man, but he's so kind. He always understands, but not like you, my darling: he only understands with his mind. I've tried not to write to you and to make it easy for you, but I can't not write to you now. I must, even if it's for the last time. I love you."

It was an untidy, blotched scrawl. Never had Old Mole seen such a long letter from Matilda. Very carefully he folded it up and placed it in his pocketbook.

He went down to her room, and, as he knew he would, found her boxes packed, her wardrobe, her drawers, empty. The puppy, now a tolerable dog, was gazing ruefully at her trunks, ominous of departure.

She came in, was startled to see him, recovered herself, and smiled at him.

"Will you come with me?" he said.

She followed him upstairs.

"I have something to show you."

He led her to his room. On the floor were his bags, hatbox, rug, packed, strapped and labeled.

"I am going," he said. "The puppy will not mind my going."

VII

APPENDIX

A LETTER FROM H. J. BEENHAM TO A. Z. PANOUKIAN, M.P.

_"For two years it was the fashion among the English to cut out the appendix; but the fashion died and appendices are now retained."_

OBSERVATIONS AMONG THE ENGLISH, BY C. L. HUNG (BRETZELFRESSER COMPANY, HONG KONG AND NEW YORK).

VII

APPENDIX

CAPRAIA.

MY DEAR PANOUKIAN,

So you have become a politician! I had hoped for better things.

It is ten years now since I left England, so that I can write to you without the prickly heat of moral prejudice. It is a year since I saw you in Venice, you and her. She had her arm in yours and you did not see me. You saw nothing but her, and she saw nothing but you, and it was clear to me that you were enjoying your tenth honeymoon, which is, surely, a far greater thing than the first, if only you can get to it. You came out of St. Mark's, you and she, and I was so close that I could have touched you. I shrank into the shadow and watched you feed the pigeons, and then you had tea on the sunlit side of the Piazza and then you strolled toward the Rialto. I took a gondola to the station and fled to Verona, for I could have no room in your tenth Eden. Verona is the very place for a bachelor, which, I there discovered, I have never ceased to be. Verona belongs to Romeo and Juliet, and no other lovers may do more than pass the day there, salute and speed on to Venice. But a bachelor may stay there many days: he will find an excellent local wine, good cigars built round straws, passable food, and the swift-flowing Adige wherein to cast his thoughts. This I did, with a blessing or two to be conveyed to you in Venice. I hope you received them. The Adige bears thoughts and blessings and sewage with equal zest to his goal, as I would all men might do.

I stayed for a month in Verona and I remember little of it but some delicious plums I bought in the marketplace and ate in the amphitheater, spitting the stones down into the arena with a dexterity I have only seen equaled by Matilda in the days of my first acquaintance with her. That is far back now, but there is not a moment of it all that I do not like to remember, and there in the amphitheater I told myself the whole adventure as a story from which I was detached. It moved me more than the house of Juliet, more than all the sorrows of the Scaligers, for it is a modern story and, as Molière said, _"Les anciens sont les anciens et nous sommes les gens d'aujourd'hui."_

_Aujourd'hui!_ To-day! That is the marvel, that out of the swiftly moving, ever changing vapor which is life we should achieve anything so positive. To-day never goes. There is a thing called yesterday, but that is only the dust-bin at the door into which we cast our refuse, our failures, our worn-out souls. There is a thing called to-morrow, but that is the storehouse of to-day, bursting with far better things, emotions, loves, hopes, than those we have discarded. But into to-day the whole passionate force of the universe is poured, through us, through all things, and therefore to-day is marvelous.

Here in Italy there is some worship of to-day. There are times and times when it is enough to be alive; and there are times when the light glows magically and the whole body and being of a man melt into it, thrill in worship, and then, however old he be, however burdened with Time's tricks of the flesh, in his heart there are songs and dancing.