Part 22

(It is really delightful to be writing to you again. It brings you before me, as a boy, a little piping boy; as a posturing and conceited youth--do you remember the cruel snub inflicted on you by Tallien, the French master? I had sent you to him with a message, and he said: "Tell Mr. Beenham I will take no message from his conceited puppy." You! A prefect!--as a heated and quite too Stendhalian young man. It is charming.)

But I am rueful when I reflect that I solved my difficulty, which, after all, was a portion of the English difficulty, by leaving England. I should have stayed; fought it out; wrestled through with it until the three of us were properly and in all eyes established in that new relation to which inevitably we should have come. I was too old. I was too much under the habit of thinking of consequences; too English, too theatrical to believe that life does not deal in neat and finished endings. I could see nothing before me but the ugly conventional way of throwing mud at the woman and bringing you to an unjust and undeserved ruin, or the way most pleasing to my sentimentality, of withdrawing from the scene and leaving you to make the best of it; as, no doubt, you have done, since you are both successful personages and well in the limelight, and able to go triumphantly from honeymoon to honeymoon.

Are there children? I hope there are children!

And there begins my real difficulty. Not that I care about legitimacy. No reasonable child will ask more than to be conceived in a healthy body, born in a clean atmosphere, and bred in a decently ordered home. But if there are children you should not be separated. Perhaps you are not. Perhaps I have been long enough absent for your world to forget my existence. But I have my doubts. I too much dread the English atmosphere not to feel that it must have been too strong for you, and you will have accepted your parts in the play.

But, if there are children, there should be no play-acting in their immediate surroundings, in the love that brought them into being.

How I wish you could have seen my marionettes! We should then have an emotional meeting point. As it is, I seem to be dancing round and round you almost as agilely as though I were with you in England, in the thick of polite London. That surely is what you need, on your thickly populated island, a point at which the lower streams of thought can converge, so that your existence may more resemble a noble estuary than a swampy delta.

You will see that I am sane enough to be thinking more of your (possibly non-existent) children than of you. There are two clear ideas in my head, and they desire each other in marriage--the idea of children and the idea of the theater. But, alas! I fear it is beyond me to bring them together. I cannot reach beyond my marionettes, which are, after all, only the working models of the theater I should like to conceive, and, having conceived, to create and set down in England as a reproach to the clumsy sentimental play-acting of English life. That would, I believe, more powerfully than any other instrument, quell the disease. If you had a theater which was a place of art it would lead you on to life, and you would presently discard the sham morals, imitation art, false emotions, and tortuous thoughts with which you now defend yourselves against it.

I have written much under my umbrella. I hope I have said something. At least, with this, I shake you by the hand and we three puppets dance on through the merry burlesque which our modern life will seem to be to the wiser and healthier generations who shall come after us.

The old are supposed to be in a position to advise the young. I have learned through you, and yet I may give you this counsel: "If ever you find yourself faced with a risk, take it." Love, I conclude, is a voyager, and it is our privilege to travel with him; but, if we stay too long in the inn of habit, we lose his company and are undone.

Yours affectionately,

H. J. BEENHAM.

Transcriber's Note

Images of the source text used in this transcription are available through the Internet Archive. See:

archive.org/details/oldmolebeingsurp00cannrich

The British first edition published by Martin Secker was used to confirm specific readings (e.g., hyphenation) of the source text. Images of this edition are also available through the Internet Archive. See:

archive.org/details/oldmolebeingsurp00canniala

The following change was noted:

-- p. 207: or a parasite, or a tyrant;--A closing quotation mark was inserted between "tyrant" and the semicolon.