Part 6

Mr. Mole found that it is much easier to get married in life than in sentimental fiction. He never proposed to Matilda, never discussed the matter with her, only after the interview with Mrs. Copas she kissed him in the morning and in the evening, and as often in between as she felt inclined. He made arrangements with the registrar, bought a special license and a ring. He said: "I take you, Matilda Burn, to be my lawful wedded wife," and she said: "I take you, Herbert Jocelyn Beenham, to be my lawful wedded husband." Mrs. Copas sat on the registrar's hat, and, without any other incident, they were made two in one and one in two.

In view of the approaching change in his condition he had written to his lawyer and his banker in Thrigsby, giving orders to have all his personal property realized and placed on deposit, also for five hundred pounds to be placed on account for Mrs. H. J. Beenham.

The day after his wedding came this letter from the Head Master:

"MY DEAR BEENHAM:--I am delighted that your whereabouts has been discovered. All search for you has been unavailing--one would not have thought it so easy for a man to disappear--and I had begun to be afraid that you had gone abroad. As I say, I am delighted, and I trust you are having a pleasant vacation. I owe you, I am afraid, a profound apology. If there be any excuse, it must be put down to the heat and the strain of the end of the scholastic year. I was thinking, I protest, only of the ancient foundation which you and I have for so long served. The Chairman of the Governors, always, as you know, your friend, has denounced what he is pleased to call my Puritanical cowardice. The Police have made inquiries about the young woman and state that she is a domestic servant who left her situation in distressing circumstances without her box and without a character. I do apologize most humbly, my dear Beenham, and I look to see you in your place at the commencement of the approaching term."

Old Mole read this letter three times, and the description of his wife stabbed him on each perusal more deeply to the heart. He tore the sheet across and across and burned the pieces on the hearth. Matilda came in and found him at it: and when she spoke to him he gave no answer, but remained kneeling by the fender, turning the poker from one hand to the other.

"Are you cross with me?" she said.

"No. Not with you. Not with you. Not with you."

"You don't often say things three times."

She came and laid her hands on his shoulders, and he took them and kissed them, for now he adored her.

In the evening came a knock at the front door. Mr. Mole was at the theater arranging for a new play with which to reopen when the boxing season, which had been extended, was over. The slut of a landlady took no notice, and the knock was repeated thrice. Matilda went down and opened the door and found on the step a short, plump, rotund, elegant little man with spectacles and a huge mustache. He asked for Mr. Beenham, and she said she was Mrs. Beenham. He drew himself up and was very stiff and said at the back of his throat:

"I am your husband's brother."

She took him upstairs to their sitting-room, and he told her how distressed he was at the news that had reached him and to find his brother living in such a humble place. He added that it was a serious blow to all his family, but that, for his part, the world being what it was and life on it being also what it was, he hoped that all might be for the best. Matilda let him have his say and tactfully led him on to talk about himself, and he told her all about his practice at the Chancery Bar, and the wine at his club, and his rooms in Gray's Inn, and his collection of Battersea china, and his trouble with the committee of his golf club, and his dislike for most of his relations except his brother Herbert, who was the last man in the world, as he said, he had ever expected to go off the rails. She assured him then that Herbert was the best and kindest of men, and that it would not be her fault if their subsequent career did not astonish and delight him. She did not drop a single aitch, and, noticing carefully his London pronunciation, she mentally resolved to change her broad a's and in future to call a schoolmaster a schoolmarster. . . . Their conversation came abruptly to an end, and she produced a pack of cards and taught him how to play German whist. From that he led her to double-dummy Bridge, and they were still at it when his brother returned. Matilda was scolded for being up so late, kissed, by both men, and packed off to bed.

Whisky was produced. Said brother Robert:

"Well, of all the lunatics!"

"So you've been shocked and amazed and horrified. Do the others know?"

"Not yet. . . . I thought I'd better see you first."

"All right. Tell them that I'm married and have become a rogue and a vagabond."

"You're not going on with this?"

"I am."

"Don't be a fool. Your wife's perfectly charming. There's nothing against her."

"That's had nothing to do with it. I'm going on for my own satisfaction. I've spent half my life in teaching. I want to spend the rest of it in learning."

"From play-actors? Oh! come!"

"My dear Robert, life isn't at all what you think it is. It isn't what I thought it was. I'm interested. I'm eager. I'm keen. . . ."

"And mad. . . ."

"Maybe. But I tell you that life's got a heart to it somewhere, and I'm going to find my way to it."

"Then you're not going back?"

"Never: neither to the old work, nor to the old kind of people."

"Not even when I tell you that Uncle Jocelyn is dead at last and has left us each ten thousand! Doesn't that make any difference, H. J.?"

H. J. received this intelligence almost with dismay. It took him back into the family councils, the family speculations as to Uncle Jocelyn's will, the family squabbles over Uncle Jocelyn's personal effects and their distribution, the family impatience at Uncle Jocelyn's unconscionable long time in dying. And the vision of it all irritated and weighed heavily on him. Often in Thrigsby he had said to himself that when Uncle Jocelyn died he would retire. And now Uncle Jocelyn was dead and he found his legacy rather a bewilderment than a relief. It was such a large sum of money that it made him fall back into his old sense of the grotesque in his relations with Mr. Copas and his galley, just when he was congratulating himself on being able to enter on his new life with real zest and energy.

"No," he said, "that makes no difference. I shall stay where I am."

"If there is ever any trouble," replied Robert, "I shall be only too glad to help."

"Thank you."

Robert tapped at his mustache and said:

"I suppose being married won't interfere with your golf."

"I'm afraid it will." This came very tartly.

"Er. . . . Sorry."

That had flicked Robert on the raw. He had been feeling indulgent toward his demented brother until his more than doubtful attitude toward ten thousand pounds. When that was followed with the renunciation of golf he was genuinely distressed and went away muttering behind his mustache:

"I give it up. I give it up. 'Pon my honor. _Non compos,_ don't y'know, _non compos_."

Nothing would induce Old Mole to visit Thrigsby again, and his solicitor had to send a clerk down with documents for his signature. When all the legal threads were tied up he told Matilda the extent of his fortune, and how he had been asked to return to his position at the school.

"Are you sorry?" she asked.

"No."

"You sha'n't ever be, for me. Will you read to me now?"

And he read the first two acts of "King Lear."

"That isn't the play you were reading the other day. The one about Venice and the man who was such a good soldier."

He had begun "Othello," but it had filled him with terror, for it had brought home to him the jealousy that was gnawing at his heart, creeping into his bones. Delivered from sentimentality by his surrender to his own generous impulse, sanded over as he was by years of celibacy, he had day by day more swiftly yielded to this woman whom he had taken for his wife, and had arrived at a passion torn, knotted, and twisted by jealousy of that other whom he had never known, whose child now waxed in her womb and brought her to long periods of almost self-hypnotized inward pondering, so that, though she was all grace, all tenderness and gratitude toward him, she was never his, never, even in their most pleasant moments, anything but remote. The agonies through which he passed made him only the more determined to be gentle with her, and often when he took her hand and pressed it, and she gave him not the pressure in return for which he hoped and so longed, he would be unable to bear it and would go out and walk for miles and cry out upon the injustice of the world. And then he would think that perhaps she loved him, perhaps it was an even greater torture to her to have this other between them; surely if that were so it must be keener suffering for her since it was her doing and her folly and not his. And he would hate the stain upon her, give way before the violence of his hatred, and call her unworthy and long with a sick longing for purity, an ideal mating, the first kindling in both man and woman so that each could be all to the other, wholly, with never so much as a thought lost in the past, never so much as the smallest wear and usage of anterior desire. . . . He would persuade himself that she did not love him at all; that she and the old bawd had entrapped him by sordid and base cunning. And those were the worst hours of all. But when he was with her and she gave him her smile or some little sudden friendly caress he would feel comforted and very sure of her and of the future when they would both forget, and then both his hatred and his longing for a perfect world would fall away from him and he would see them as absurd projections of those contrasts which arise and haunt the half-comprehending mind. And he would tell himself that all would be well; that they would be happy in the child which would be his also, for the love he had for her. And his jealousy would return.

Therefore he read "King Lear," and the pity of it purged him, though he was not without feeling that he, too, was cast out upon the barren places of the earth to face the storm and meet disaster. Feeling so he said to Matilda:

"Money and material things seem to have nothing to do with life at all. Here am I with you, whom I love. . . ."

"Do you?"

"I love you."

"Thank you."

"With you, and no possible anxiety as to the future, and yet I seem to myself to be on the very brink of explosion and disaster."

"Dear man, I wish you wouldn't think so much."

"I must think, or my feelings swamp me."

She thrilled him by taking his hand, and she said:

"Do you know what I want?"

"No. You shall have it."

"I want to make you happy."

That was the most definite assurance of her feeling for him she had as yet given him. It soothed his jealousy, made it easier for him to conquer it, but presently it laid him open to a new dread. The time for her confinement was drawing on, and he began to think that out, too; the violence and bloodiness of birth haunted him, the physical pain it entailed, the possibility of its being attended by death. She had promised him happiness, and she might die! He became over-scrupulous in his treatment of her and worried her about her health so that she lost her temper and said:

"After all, it's me that's got to go through with it, and _I_ don't think about it."

That brought him up sharp, and he held his peace and watched her. Truly she did not think about it. She accepted it. It was to her, it seemed, entirely a personal matter, perfectly in the order of things, to be worried through as occasion served. It might go well, or it might go ill, but meanwhile there were the things of the moment to be attended to and the day's pleasure to be seized. He was humbled and a little envious of her. For a little while he indulged in an orgy of self-reproach, but she only laughed at him and told him that when she had so much cause for feeling depressed he might at least comfort her with the sight of a cheerful face. He laughed, too, and told himself he was a selfish ass and that she was made that way and he was made another, and that perhaps men and women are made so, men thinking and women accepting, or perhaps they only become so in the progress of their lives.

Matilda's baby came four months after their marriage. It was still-born.

II

MARRIAGE

_Sie war liebenswürdig und er liebte sie: aber er war nicht liebenswürdig und sie liebte ihn nicht._

II

MARRIAGE

MATILDA kept her promise and made her husband happy. She reduced him to that condition wherein men and women believe that never has the world been visited by such love and that they will go on loving forever and ever. This she achieved by leaving his affections to look after themselves and concentrating all her energies on seeing that he was properly fed and clothed, had the requisite amount of sleep and just enough cosseting to make him wish for more, which he did not get. She left the ordering of their coexistence in his hands, and he, being happy, span a cocoon of charming fancies about it, and showed little disposition to change. Therefore they continued with Mr. Copas and became acquainted with the four quarters of England and the two or three kinds of towns which in vast numbers have grown on it, like warts on the face of Oliver Cromwell. Bemused by the romance of love and the sense of well-being that its gratification brings, he observed very little and thought less, and he did not perceive that he was falling into a routine as dispirited as that in which he had gone round and round out of adolescence into manhood and out of manhood into middle age. Such is the power of love--or rather of a certain very general over-indulged variant of it--that it can lift a man out of space and time and set him drifting and dreaming through a larger portion of his allotted span than he can afford to lose. As there is a sort of peace in this condition, it is highly prized: indeed, it passes for an ideal, being as material as a fatted pig into whose sides you can poke your finger, as into a cushion; it has the further merit that it needs no effort to attain, but only a fall and no struggle. Old Mole fell into it and prized it and told himself that life was very good. When he told his wife that life was very good she said that it was a matter of opinion and it depended what you happened to want.

"What do you want?" he asked.

She thumped her chest with the odd little teasing gesture that was perhaps most characteristic of her, and said:

"Something big."

"Aren't you content?"

"Oh, yes. But I want to know, to find out."

He stretched his legs and, with a beautiful sense of enunciating wisdom, he remarked:

"There is nothing to know, nothing to find out. Here are we, a man and a woman, fulfilling the destiny of men and women, and, for the rest, happy enough in the occupation to which circumstances and our several destinies and characters have brought us. I am perfectly happy, my dear, most surprisingly happy when I look back and consider all things. I have no ambition, no hopes, and, I fancy, no illusions; most happily of all, I have no politics. I did not make the world and I do not believe that I can undo anything good or evil which, for the world's purposes, is necessary to be done. . . ."

He had developed a habit of talking and did not know it. She had taken refuge in silence and was aware of it.

Once she asked him if he did not feel the want of friends.

"Friends?" he answered. "I want nothing while I have you."

She made no reply and he was left hurt, because he had expected appreciation of his entire devotion.

She was happy, too, but more keenly than he, for she was a little dazed by her astounding luck, and behind her pleasure in him and his unfailing kindness and consideration lay the sting of uneasiness and the dread that the comfort of such charming days could not last. Ignorant, untaught, unprepared, love had been for her a kiss of the lips, a surrender to the flood of perilous feeling, a tampering with forces that might or might not sweep you to ruin: a matter of fancy, dalliance, and risk. She had fancied, dallied, dared, and when she had thought to be swept to ruin--and that swift descent also had had its sickening fascination--she had been tumbled into this security where love was solid, comfortable, omnipresent, and apparently all providing. She was perpetually amazed at her husband and chafed only against herself because she could not share his complacency. It was easy for her to assimilate his manners and to take the measure of his refinement. With talk of her brothers and sisters she would lead him on to tell of his family, and especially of the women among whom he had spent his boyhood, and she would contrast herself with them and rebel against everything in herself that was not harmonious with their atmosphere. And she found it increasingly difficult to get on with her aunt, Mrs. Copas.

The new comic, John Lomas, was a great success. He was a fat little man in the fifties with a thorough knowledge of his business, which was to make any and every kind of audience laugh. A wonderful stock of tricks he had, tricks of voice, of limbs, of gesture, of facial expression, nothing but tricks, inexhaustible. He cared about nothing in the world but what he called "the laugh," and when he got one he wanted another, and always had a quip or a leer or a cantrip to get it. But he was a rascal and a drunkard, and had lost all sense of the fitness of things and always went on too long until his audience was weary of him. Therefore he had come down and down until he found an appetite to feed that was gross enough to bear with his insistence. . . . He said--it may have been true--that he had played before the King of England, and he was full of stories of the theaters in London, the real nobby theaters where the swells paid half a guinea for a seat and brought their wives and other people's wives in shining jewels and dresses cut low back and front. He had played in every kind of piece, from the old-fashioned kind of burlesque to melodrama, drama, and Shakespeare, and he had never had any luck, but had always been on the point of making a fortune. "Charley's Aunt," he said, had been offered to him, and he had taken an option, but at the last moment his backers failed him. "And look at the money that had made and was still making." His first stage of intoxication was melancholy, and then he would weep over the mess he had made of his life and grow maudlin and tell how badly he had treated the dear little woman who had been his wife so that she had left him and gone off with a bloody journalist. When that mood passed he would grow excited and blustering, and brag of the slap-up women he had had when he was making his thirty pounds a week. His most intimate confessions were reserved for Matilda, for he despised Copas because he had never known anything better than a fit-up. And of Mr. Mole he was rather scared.

"I don't know," he would say to Matilda. "I don't know what it is, but your guv'nor ain't one of us, is he now?"

And when Matilda agreed that Mr. Mole was different he called her a silly cuckoo for not making him take her to London and the Continong to have a high old time.

He could play the piano in a fumbling fashion, and he used to sing through the scores of some of the old pieces he had been in, with reminiscences of the players who had been successful in them and full histories of their ups and downs and their not unblemished lives, all with a full-throated sentimentality that made every tale as he told it romantic and charming. Broken and rejected by it as he was, he worshiped the theater and gloried in it, and the smell of the grease paint was to him as the smell of the field to a Jewish patriarch.

One day he insisted that Matilda should sing, and he taught her one of the old coon songs that had haunted London in the days of his prosperity. At first she was shy and sang only from her throat, and he banged out the accompaniment and drowned her voice and told her that really no one would hear her but the conductor. She must sing so that she could feel as if her voice was a little bigger than herself. The phrase seized her imagination, and she tried again. This time she produced a few full notes and then had no breath left to compass the rest. However, he was satisfied, and said she'd do for the chorus all right.

"And some of those gels, mark you," he said, "do very well for themselves, in the way of marriage, and out of it."

He taught her to dance, said she had just the feet for it. "Not real slap-up dancing, of course, but the sort you get in any old London show; the sort that's good enough with all the rest--and you've got that all right, my dear--and not a bit of good without it."

The development of these small accomplishments gave her a very full pleasure, greater confidence in herself, and a feeling of independence. She took a naïve and childish pride in her body from which these wonders came. They gave her far keener delight than "the acting" had ever done, but she never connected them with her ambition. They were a purely personal secret treasure, an inmost chamber whither she could retire and let go, and be expansively, irresponsibly herself.

Toward the end of the first year of their marriage, in the harsh months of the close of the year, they were for six weeks in a city that sprawled and tumbled over the huge moors of Yorkshire. It rained almost continuously, and it was very cold, but in that city, which almost less than any other of the industrial purgatories of the kingdom appreciates art and the things of the mind, they prospered. John Lomas got his fill of laughter, and, the kinematograph being no new thing there, the theater weathered that competition.

Matilda wrote to her sister, Mrs. Boothroyd, whose husband was employed at the municipal gasworks, and sent her a pass. She gave her news: how she was married and happy and enjoying her work with her uncle. The Boothroyd family only knew of Matilda's disaster and nothing of her subsequent history. Mr. Boothroyd, who was a deacon at his chapel, forbade his wife to take any notice of the letter, and she obeyed him, but, when he was on the night shift at the works, she made use of the pass.

The program consisted of Mr. Mole's "Iphigenia," and a farce introduced into the repertory by John Lomas from what he could remember of a successful venture at the old Strand Theater in London. Matilda appeared in both pieces. She was so successful that Mrs. Boothroyd, who sat in the front row, swelled with pride, and, as she clapped her hands, turned to her neighbor:

"Isn't she good? And so pretty, too! Whoever would have thought it? But there always was something about her. She's my sister, you know."

"Indeed? Then I am pleased to meet you. She is my wife."

"Well, I never! . . ."

Mrs. Boothroyd seized Old Mole by the hand and shook it warmly, while she giggled with excitement. She bore a faint resemblance to Matilda, but looked worn, had that pathetic, punctured appearance which comes from overmuch child-bearing. Throughout the rest of the performance she only glanced occasionally at the stage and devoted her attention to scanning her brother-in-law's appearance. At the close of the second piece she said:

"I _am_ glad. It would never ha' done for her to 'ave a young 'usband. She was always the flighty one."

This sounded ominously to Old Mole, who for more than a year now had been young with Matilda's youth, and so comfortably accustomed to it that he never dared in thought dissever himself from her. He rejoined that his sister-in-law would be glad to know that Matilda was settled down.