Part 5

He determined to visit the kinematograph, and after he and Mr. Copas had completed their round and made it possible for a large number of the inhabitants of the Potteries to become aware of their existence, he returned to the Theater Royal and fetched Matilda. They paid threepence each and sat in the best seats in the middle of the hall, where they were regaled with a Wild West melodrama, an adventure of Max Linder, a Shakespearean production by a famous London actor, a French drama of love and money, and a picture of bees making honey in their hive. Matilda liked the bees and the horses in the Wild West melodrama. When Max Linder climbed into a piano and the hammers hit him on the nose and eyes she laughed; but she said the French drama was silly, and as for the Shakespearean production she said:

"You can't follow the play, but I suppose it's good for you."

"How do you mean--good for you?"

"I mean you don't really like it, but there's a lot of it, and a lot of people, and the dresses are lovely. It doesn't get hold of you like uncle does sometimes."

"Your uncle says the kinemas are ruining the country."

"Oh! He only means they're making business bad for him."

"Your uncle says you'll never make an actress, Matilda."

"Does he?"

(Some one behind them said "Ssh!"

"Ssh yourself," retorted Matilda. "There ain't nothing to hear.")

"Does he?" she said. "What do _you_ think?"

"I'm afraid I don't know much about it."

For the first time he noted that when he was with Matilda his brain worked in an entirely novel fashion. It was no longer cool and fastidiously analytical, seizing on things and phenomena from the outside, but strangely excited and heated, athletic and full of energy and almost rapturously curious about the inside of things and their relation one with another. For instance, he had hitherto regarded the kinematograph as a sort of disease that had broken out all over the face of the world, but now his newly working mind, his imagination --that was the word for it--saw it as human effort, as a thing controlled by human wills to meet human demands. It did not satisfy his own demand, nor apparently did it satisfy Matilda's. For the rest of the audience he would not venture to decide. Indeed he gave little thought to them, for he was entirely absorbed by the wonder of the miracle that had come to him, the new vision of life, the novel faculty of apprehension. He was in a state of ferment and could not sort his impressions and ideas, but he was quite marvelously interested in himself, and, casting about for expression of it all, he remembered stories of seeds buried for years under mighty buildings in cities and how when the buildings were pulled down those seeds put forth with new vigor and came to flower. So (he said to himself) it had been with him. Excitedly he turned to Matilda and said:

"About this acting. Do you yourself think you can do it?"

"I'm sure I can."

"Then you shall."

The lights in the hall went up to indicate the end of the cycle of pictures.

All that night and through the next day his exaltation continued, and then suddenly it vanished, leaving him racked by monstrous doubts. His mind, the full exercise of which had given him such thrilling delight, seemed to become parched and shriveled as a dried pea. Where had been held out for him the promise of fine action was now darkness, and he sank deeper and deeper into a muddy inertia. Fear possessed him and brought him to agony, dug into his sides with its spur, drove him floundering on, and when out of the depths of his soul he strove to squeeze something of that soaring energy that had visited him or been struck out of him (he knew not which it was) he could summon nothing more powerful to his aid than anger. He wept tears of anger--anger at the world, at himself, and the blind, aimless force of events, at his own impotence to move out of the bog, at the folly and obstinacy which had led him to submit to the affront that had been put upon him by men who for years had been his colleagues and comrades. His anger was blown to a white heat by disgust when he looked back and counted the years he had spent in fatted security mechanically plying a mechanical profession, shut out by habit and custom from both imaginative power and the impotence of exhaustion. He raged and stormed and blubbered, and he marveled at the commotion going on within him as he pursued his daily tasks, read aloud with Matilda, argued with Mr. Copas, took money at the door of the theater in the evening, sat among the dirty, smelling, loutish audience. In his bitterness he found a sort of comfort in reverting to his old bantering attitude toward women, to find it a thousand times intensified. More than half the audience were women, poor women, meanly dressed, miserably corseted; the fat women bulged and heaved out of their corsets, and the thin women looked as though they had been dropped into theirs and were only held up by their armpits. There they sat, hunched and bunched, staring, gaping, giggling, moping, chattering, chattering . . . Ach! They were silly.

And the men? God save us! these sodden, stupid clods were men. They slouched and sprawled and yawned and spat. Their hands were dirty, their teeth yellow, and their speech was thick, clipped, guttural, inhuman. . . . Driven on by a merciless logic he was forced into consideration of himself. As he sat there at the end of the front row he turned his hands over and over; fat, stumpy hands they were, and he put them up and felt the fleshiness of his neck, the bushy hair growing out of his ears, and he ran them along his plump legs and prodded the stoutness of his belly. He laughed at himself. He laughed at the whole lot of them. And he tried to remember a single man or a single woman whom he had encountered in his life and could think of as beautiful. Not one.

He turned his attention to the stage. Copas was almost a dwarf, a strutting, conceited little dwarf, pouring out revolting nonsense, a hideous caricature of human beings who were the caricatures of creation. He said to himself:

"I must get out of this."

And he found himself using a phrase he had employed for years in dealing with small boys who produced slovenly work and wept when he railed at them:

"Tut! Tut! This will never do!"

At that he gasped. He was using the phrase to himself! He was therefore like a small boy in the presence of outraged authority, and that authority was (words came rushing in on him) his own conscience, his own essence, liberated, demanding, here and now, among men and women as they are, the very fullness of life.

He had not regained his mood of delight, but rather had reached the limit of despair, had ceased blindly and uselessly to struggle, but cunningly, cautiously began to urge his way out of his despond. Whatever happened, he must move forward. Whatever happened, he must know, discover, reach out and grasp.

And he blessed the illumination that had come to him, blessed also the blackness and misery into which, incontinently, he had fallen. He submitted to exhaustion and was content to await an accretion of energy.

Thereafter, for a little while, he found himself more akin to Mr. Copas, drank with him, cracked jokes with him, walked with him and listened to his talk. He began to appreciate Mrs. Copas and to understand that being beaten by a man is not incompatible with a genuine affection and sympathy for him. He speculated not at all, and more than ever his instruction of Matilda became dependent upon her caprice.

Her uncle now gave her a salary of five shillings a week and upon her first payment she went out and bought a cigar for her mentor. She gave three half-pence for it and he smoked it and she wore the band on her little finger. To guard against such presents in the future he bought himself a box of fifty Manilas.

Mrs. Copas began to sound him as to his resources. Losing patience with his evasions she asked him at last bluntly if he were rich. He turned his cigar round his tongue and said:

"It depends what you mean by rich."

"Well," she replied cautiously, feeling her ground, "could you lay your hands on fifty pounds without selling anything?"

"Certainly I could, or a hundred."

"A hundred pounds!"

Her eyes and mouth made three round O's and she was silenced.

Both were astonished and both sat, rather awkwardly, adjusting their financial standards. She took up her knitting and he plied his cigar. They were sitting on boxes outside the stage door in the warm August sunlight. She gave a discreet little cough and said:

"You don't . . . you didn't . . . have a wife, did you?"

"No. I have never had a wife."

"Think of that now. . . . You'd have a house-keeper maybe?"

"A married couple looked after me."

"Well, I never! Well, there's never any knowing, is there?"

He had learned by this time that there was nothing at all behind Mrs. Copas's cryptic utterances. If there were anything she could arrive at it by circumlocution, and in her own good time would make it plain. Her next remark might have some connection with her previous train of thought or it might not. She said in a toneless, detached voice:

"And to think of you turning up with our Matilda. And they do say how everything's for the best. . . . It's a pity business is so bad here, isn't it?"

Business was very bad. The faithful few of the district who always patronized Mr. Copas year after year attended, but they amounted to no more than fifty, while the young people were drawn off by the kinematograph. They even sank so far as to admit children free for three nights in the hope that their chatter would incite their parents to come and share the wonders they had seen. On the fourth night only four old women and a boy paid for admission.

The situation was saved by a publican on the other side of the square who, envious of his rival's successful enterprise with the kinematograph, hired the theater for a week's boxing display, by his nephew, who was an ex-champion of the Midlands with a broken nose and reputation.

That week was one of the most miserable depression. Mr. Copas drank freely. Mrs. Copas never stopped chatting, the company demanded their salaries up to date, accepted a compromise and disappeared, and the ex-champion of the Midlands took a fancy to Matilda. He followed her in the streets, sent her half-pounds of caramels, accosted her more than once and asked her if she did not want a new hat, and when she snubbed him demanded loudly to know what a pretty girl like her was doing without a lad. Chivalrously, not without a tremor, Mr. Mole offered himself as her escort in her walks abroad. They were invariably followed by the boxer whistling and shouting at intervals. Sometimes he would lag behind them and embark upon a long detailed and insulting description of Mr. Mole's back view; sometimes he would hurry ahead, look round and leer and make unpleasant noises with his lips or contemptuous gestures with his hands.

Matilda had found a certain spot by a canal where it passed out of the town and made a bee-line across the country. There was a bridge over a sluice which marked the cleavage between the sweet verdure of the fields and the soiled growth of the outskirts of the town. It was a lonely romantic spot and she wished to visit it again before they left. She explained to her friend that she wanted to be alone but dared not because of her pursuer, and her friend agreed to leave her on the bridge and to lurk within sight and earshot.

They had to go by tram. The boxer was twenty yards behind them. They hurried on, mounted the tram just as it was starting, and congratulated themselves on having avoided him. When they reached the bridge there he was sitting on the parapet, whistling and leering. Matilda flamed scarlet and turned to go. Boiling with fury Old Mole hunched up his shoulders, tucked down his head (the attitude familiar to so many Thrigsbians), and bore down on the offender. He grunted out:

"Be off."

" 'Ave you bought the bally bridge?"

And he grinned. The coarseness and beastliness of the creature revolted Mr. Mole, roused him to such a pitch of furious disgust, that he lost all sense of what he was doing, raised his stick, struck out, caught the fellow in the chest and sent him toppling over into the pool. He leaned over the parapet and watched the man floundering and splashing and gulping and spitting and cursing, saw his face turn greeny white with hard terror, but was entirely unmoved until he felt Matilda's hand on his arm and heard her blubbering and crying:

"He's drowning! He's drowning!"

Then he rushed down and lay on his stomach on the bank and held out his stick, further, further, as far as he could reach, until the lout in the water clutched it. The boxer had lost his head. He tugged at the stick and it looked for a moment as though there would be two men in the water. It was a question which would first be exhausted. Grayer and grayer and more distorted grew the boxer's face, redder and redder and more swollen Old Mole's, until at last the strain relaxed and Matilda's tormentor was drawn into shallow water and out on to the bank. There he lay drenched, hiccoughing, spitting, concerned entirely with his own discomfort and giving never a thought either to the object of his desires or his assailant and rescuer. At last he shook himself like a dog, squeezed the water out of his sleeves, sprang to his feet and was off like a dart along the towpath in the direction of the tall fuming chimneys of the town.

Matilda and Old Mole walked slowly out toward the setting sun and in front of them for miles stretched the regiments of pollarded willows like mournful distorted human beings condemned forever to stand and watch over the still waters.

"Life," said Old Mole, "is full of astonishments. I should never have thought it of myself."

"He was very nearly drowned," rejoined Matilda.

"It is very singular," said he, more to himself than to her, "that one's instinct should think such a life worth saving. A more bestial face I never saw."

"I think," said she, "you would help anybody whatever they were like."

She took his arm and they walked on, as it seemed, into the darkness. Until they turned, neither spoke. He said:

"I am oddly miserable when I think that in a fortnight the school will reopen and I shall not be there. I suppose it's habit, but I want to go back and I know I never shall."

"I don't want never to go back."

"Don't you? But then you're young and I'm rather old."

"I don't think of you as old. I always think of you as some one very good and sometimes you make me laugh."

"Oh! Matilda, often, very often, you make me want to cry. And men don't cry."

A little scornfully Matilda answered:

"_Don't_ they!"

Through his mournfulness he felt a glow of happiness, a little aching in his heart, a sort of longing and a pleasant pride in this excursion with a young woman clinging to his arm and treating him with sweet consideration and tenderness.

"After all," he thought, "it is certainly true that when they reach middle age men do require an interest in some young life."

So, having fished out a theory, as he thought, to meet the case, he was quite content and prepared, untroubled, to enjoy his happiness.

He did thoroughly enjoy his happiness. His newly awakened but unpracticed imagination worked like that of a sentimental and self-cloistered writer who, having no conception of human relationships, binds labels about the necks of his personages-- Innocent Girlhood, Middle-aged Bachelorhood, Mother's Love, Manly Honor, English Gentleman--and amuses himself and his readers with propping them up in the attitudes meet and right to their affixed characters. Except that he did not drag the Deity into it, Old Mole lived perfectly for a short space of time in a neatly rounded novelette, with himself as the touching, lamb-like hero and Matilda as the radiant heroine. He basked in it, and when on her he let loose a flood of what he thought to be emotion she only said:

"Oh! Go on!"

True to his sentimentality he was entirely unconscious of, absolutely unconcerned with, what she might be feeling. He only knew that he had been battered and bewildered and miserable and that now he was comfortable and at his ease.

The appointed end of all such things, in print and out of it, is marriage. Outside marriage there is no such thing as affection between man and woman (in that atmosphere passion and desire do not exist and children are not born but just crop up). True to his fiction--and how many men are ever true to anything else?--Old Mole came in less than a week to the idea of marriage with Matilda. It was offensive to his common sense, so repugnant indeed that it almost shocked him back into the world of fact and that hideous mental and spiritual flux from which he was congratulating himself on having escaped. He held his nose and gulped it down and sighed:

"Ah! Let us not look on the dark side of life!"

Then he asked himself:

"Do I love her? She has young dreams of love. How can I give her my love and not shatter them?"

And much more in this egoistic strain he said, the disturbance in his heart, or whatever organ may be the seat of the affections, having totally upset his sense of humor. He told himself, of course, that she was hardly the wife for a man of his position, but that was only by way of peppering his emotions, and he was really rather amazed when he came to the further reflection that, after all, he had no position. To avoid the consternation it brought he decided to ask Matilda's hand in marriage.

As it turned out, to the utter devastation of his novelette, it was his hand that was asked.

He bought Matilda a new camisole. He had heard the word used by women and was rather staggered when he found what it was he had purchased. Confusedly he presented it to Innocent Girlhood. She giggled and then, with a shout of laughter, rushed off to show Mrs. Copas her gift. He did not on that occasion stammer out his proposal.

He took her for three walks and two tram-drives at fourpence each, but she was preoccupied and morose, and gave such vague answers to his preliminary remarks that his hopes died within him and he discussed the Insurance Act and Lancashire's chances of defeating Yorkshire at Bradford. Moreover, Matilda was pale and drawn and not far from being downright ugly, far too plain for a novelette at all events. He felt himself sliding backward and could hear the buzz and roar of the chaos within himself, and the novelette was unfinished and until he came to the last jaunting little hope in the future, the last pat on the back for the hero, the final distribution of sugar-plums all round, there would be no sort of security, no sealed circle wherein to dwell. He felt sick, and the nausea that came on him was worse than the fear and doubt through which he had passed. He was like a man after a long journey come hungry to an inn to find nothing to eat but lollipops.

When they returned from their last tram-drive they had supper with Mr. and Mrs. Copas, who discussed the new actors whom they had engaged, as only two of the old company were willing to return. The new comic had acted in London, in the West End, had once made his twenty pounds a week. They were proud of him, and Mr. Copas unblushingly denounced the Drink as the undoing of many a nartist. Very early in the evening, before any move had been made to clear the plates and dishes away, Matilda declared herself tired, and withdrew. Mr. Copas went on talking and Mrs. Copas began to make horrible faces at him, so that Old Mole, in the vagueness of his acute discomfort, thought mistily that perhaps they were at the beginning of an altercation, which would end--as their altercations ended. However, the talk went on and the grimaces went on until at last Mr. Copas perceived that he was the object of them, stopped dead, seized his hat and left the room. Mrs. Copas beamed on Mr. Mole. She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. They were bare to the elbow and fat and coarse and red. She went on beaming, and nervously he took out a cigar and lit it. Mrs. Copas leaned forward and with a knife began to draw patterns with the mustard left on the edge of a plate.

"We'll be on the move again soon, Mr. Mole."

"I shall be glad of that."

"What we want to know, what I want to know and what Mr. Copas wants to know is this. What are you going to do about it?"

"I . . . I suppose I shall go with you."

"You know what I mean, Mr. Mole. Some folk ain't particular. I am. And Mr. Copas is very careful about what happens in his theater. If it can't be legitimate it can't be and there's nothing more to be said. . . . Now, Mr. Mole, what are you going to do?"

"My good woman! I haven't the least idea what you are talking about. I have enjoyed my stay with you. I have found it very instructive and profitable and I propose to----"

"It's Matilda, Mr. Mole. What's done is done. We're not saying anything about that. Some says it's a curse and some says it's the only thing worth living for. Matilda's my own husband's niece and I've got to see her properly done by whether you're offended with a little plain speaking or not, Mr. Mole."

She had now traced a very passable spider's web in mustard on the plate.

"If you need to be told, I must tell you, Mr. Mole. Matilda's in the way."

No definite idea came to Mr. Mole, but a funny little throb and trickle began at the base of his spine. He dabbed his cigar down into half a glass of beer that Mr. Copas had left.

"We've talked it out, Mr. Mole, and you've got to marry her or pay up handsome."

Marry! His first thought was in terms of the novelette, but those terms would not embrace Mrs. Copas or her present attitude. His first glimpse of the physical fact was through the chinks of his sentimental fiction, and he was angry and hurt and disgusted. Then, the fiction never having been rounded off, he was able to escape from it--(rare luck in this world of deceit)--and he shook himself free of its dust and tinsel, and, responding to the urgency of the occasion, saw or half-saw the circumstances from Matilda's point of view. Mentally he swept Mrs. Copas aside. The thing lay between himself and the girl. Out of her presence he could not either think or feel about it clearly. Only for himself there lay here and now, before him, the opportunity for action, for real, direct, effective action, which would lift him out of his despond and bring his life into touch with another life. It gave him what he most needed, movement, uplift, the occasion for spontaneity, for being rid, though it might be only temporarily, of his fear and doubt and sickness of mind. Healthily, or rather, in his eagerness for health, he refused to think of the consequences. He lit another cigar, steadying himself by a chair-back, so dazzled was he by the splendor of his resolution and the rush of mental energy that had brought him to it, and said:

"Of course, if Matilda is willing, I will marry her."

"I didn't expect it of you, being a gentleman," returned Mrs. Copas, obliterating her spider's web, "and, marriage being the lottery it is, there are worse ways of doing it than that. After all, you do know you're not drawing an absolute blank, which, I know, happens to more than ever lets on."