Part 8

It did so: the tunes in it were whistled and sung in the streets, the comedians' gags became catchwords, the principal buffoon kicked off at a charity football match, and, upon inquiry, Old Mole found that clerks, schoolboys and students visited the theater once a week, and that among the young sparks of the town, sons of mill-owners and ironmasters, there was considerable competition for the favors of the chorus ladies. Some of these phenomena he remembered having observed in Thrigsby, and at least one of his old pupils had come to grief through a lady of the chorus and been expelled by his affrighted family to the Colonies. By the end of the fifth week he was thoroughly sick of it all, and he began to agree with Timmis that the success of the show was very far from justifying it. It was so completely lacking in character as to be demoralizing. His third visit left him clogged and thick-witted, as though he had been breathing stale air. It was a poison: and if it were so for him, what (he asked himself) must it be for young minds and spirits? . . . And yet Matilda throve in it. She liked the work and she now liked the company, who, being prosperous, were amiable, and they liked her. Most of all, she loved the independence, the passage from the solid, safe, warmly tender atmosphere with which her husband surrounded her to the heat, the rush and the excitement of the theater. When he left her at the stage door she would give a shrug of the shoulders that was almost a shake, give him a swift parting smile that he always felt might have been given to a stranger, and with a quick gladness dart through into the lighted passage. . . . Before many weeks had passed she had letters, flowers, presents, from unknown admirers. He asked Timmis if there was any harm in them, and the actor replied that it was the usual thing, that women had to look after themselves in the theater, and that these attentions pleased the management. They pleased Matilda: she laughed at the letters, decorated their rooms with the flowers, and left the presents with the stage doorkeeper, who annexed them. Old Mole definitely decided that he disliked the whole business and began to think enviously of James Boothroyd, who was religious and a devil, but did at least have his own way in his own house. To achieve that the first thing necessary was to have a house, and he half resolved to return to his old profession--not considering himself to be fit for any other. But he never rounded the resolution and he never broached his thoughts to Matilda. He told himself that by Easter it would be all over and they would go away, perhaps abroad, see the world. . . . Then he realized that apart from Matilda he had no desires whatever, that his affections were entirely engaged in her, and that, further, he was spasmodically whirled off his feet in a desire that was altogether independent of his will, obedient only to some profound logic either of his own character or of the world outside him, to mark and consider the ways of men. Rather painfully he was aware of being detached from himself, and sometimes in the street, in a tram, he would pull himself up with a start and say to himself:

"I don't seem to be caring what happens to me. I seem to be altogether indifferent to whatever I am doing, to have no sort of purpose, while all these men and women round me are moving on with very definite aims."

Deliberately he made the acquaintance of men teaching in the little university of the place and in its grammar school. He saw himself in them. He could talk their language, but whereas to them their terms were precise and important, to him they were nothing but jargon. . . . No: into that squirrel cage he would not go again. They seemed happy enough and pleased with themselves, but, whereas he could enter fully into their minds, the new regions that he had conquered for himself were closed to them. They complained, as he had done in Thrigsby, of the materialism of their city, and in moments of enthusiasm talked of the great things they could do for the younger generation, the future citizens of the Empire, if only some of the oozing wealth of the manufacturers could be diverted to their uses. But the city had its own life, and they were no more a part of it than he had been of Thrigsby. . . . When they had cured him of his discontent he was done with them, and took refuge in books. He bought in a great store of them and fumbled about in them for the threads of philosophy he was seeking. He procured stimulation, but very little satisfaction, and he was driven to the streets and the public places. Very secret was the life of that city. Its trades were innumerable. Everything was manufactured in it from steel to custard powder. It owed its existence to the neighboring coalfields, its organization to a single family of bankers whose interests were everywhere, in almost every trade, in the land, in the houses, in the factories, in the supply of water and lighting, and everywhere their interests were trebly safeguarded. The city lived only for the creation of wealth and by it. With the distribution of wealth and the uses it was put to it had no concern; nor had its citizens time to consider them. Their whole energies were absorbed in keeping their place in the markets of the world, and they were too exhausted for real pleasure or domestic happiness. When Old Mole considered the life of that city by and large, James Boothroyd appeared to him as its perfect type. And yet he retained his optimism, telling himself that all this furious energy was going to the forging of the city of the future.

"The bees," he said, "build the combs in their hives, the ants the galleries in their hills, and men their sprawling cities, and to everything under the sun there is a purpose. Let me not make the mistake of judging the whole--which I cannot see--by the part."

He had reached this amiable conclusion when Carlton Timmis entered his room, sat down by the table and laid a bulky quarto envelope on it. He was agitated, declined the proffered cigar, and broke at once into the following remarkable oration:

"Mr. Mole, you are one of the few men I have ever met who can do nothing with dignity and without degradation. Therefore I have come to you in my distress to make a somewhat remarkable request. And it is due to you and to myself to make some explanation."

He seemed so much in earnest, almost hysterical, and his great eyes were blazing with such a fervor that Old Mole could not but listen.

"My real name," said Timmis, "is Cuthbert Jones. My father is a small shopkeeper in Leicestershire. He is a man, so far as I can discover, devoid of feeling, but with a taste for literature and--God knows why, at this time of day!--the philosophy of the Edinburgh school. He had a cruel sense of humor and he made my mother very unhappy. He encouraged me to read, to write, to think, to be pleased with my own thoughts. It amused him, I fancy, to see me blown out with my own conceit, so that he might have the pleasure of pricking my bladder-head and then distending it again. For weeks together I would have his praise, and then nothing but the most bitter gibes. I had either to cling to my conceit to keep my head above water or sink into the depths of misery and self-distrust. I devoured the lives of illustrious men and attributed their fame to those qualities in them which I was able to find in myself. I sought solitude, avoided companions of my own age, and I was always desperately, wretchedly in love with some one or other. I really believed myself to be a genius, or rather I used to count over my symptoms and decide one day that I was, the next that I was not. All this roused my father to such a malicious delight, and with his teasing he made my life so intolerable that at last I could stand it no longer, and I ran away. I walked to London, and then, after applying in vain for work at the newspaper offices, I obtained a situation in a theater as a call boy. I could not possibly live on what I earned, and should have been in a bad way but for a kind creature, a dresser, who lodged me in her house, took my wages in return, and allowed me pocket money and money for my clothes. I wrote to my father and received an extraordinary letter in which he applauded my action and expressed his belief that nothing could prevent a man of genius from coming to the top. 'It is as impossible to keep a bad man up as to keep a good man down,' he said. I have neither gone down nor up, Mr. Mole. As I have grown older I have slipped into one precarious employment after another. No one pays any attention to me, no one, except yourself, has ever troubled to discover my thoughts on any subject, and often, when I have been inclined to think myself the most miserable of men, I have found correction in the memory of my boyish belief in my genius. . . . Such changes of fortune as I have had have come to me through women. All the kindness I ever received came through them, and every disaster that has crushed me has arisen through my inability to stop myself from falling in love with them. . . . You will understand what I mean when I talk of the life of the mind. That life has always been with me, and it has perhaps been my only real life. I have had great adventures in it. I have aimed and wrestled and struggled toward a goal that has many times seemed to me immediately attainable."

He paused and brushed back his hair, and his eyes set into an expression of extraordinary wistful longing and into his voice came a sweetness most musical and moving.

"There is, I believe, a condition within the reach of all men wherein the selfish self is shed, the barrier broken down between a man and his vision and purpose, so that his whole force can be concentrated upon his object and his every deed and every thought becomes an act of love. I have many a time come within reach of this condition, but always just when I seemed most sure I have toppled over head and ears in love with some woman, whom in a very short space of time I despised and detested. When I met you I was uplifted and exalted and come nearer to my goal than ever before, and now, more fatuously, more idiotically than ever, I am in love. . . . I give it up. I am forced to the conclusion that I am one of those unhappy beings who are condemned to live between one state and the other, to be neither a slave bent on eating, drinking, sleeping and the grosser pleasures, nor a free man satisfying his every lust and every desire, by the way, only the more sturdily and mightily to go marching on with the great army of friends, lovers and comrades. . . . In short, Mr. Mole, I am done for."

"Well, well." Old Mole was aware of the entire inadequacy of this either as comment or as consolation, but he was baffled by the self-absorption which had gone to the making of this elaborate analysis: and yet he had been stirred by the Demon King's vision of the possibilities of human nature and roused by the words "every deed and every thought an act of love." There was a platonic golden idealism about it that lifted him back into his own youth, his own always comfortable dreams, and, contrasting himself with Timmis (or Jones), he saw how immune his early years had been from suffering. Timmis might be done for, but if anyone was to blame it was his malicious, erratic father. Then, with his mind taking a wide sweep, he saw that there could be no question of blame or of attaching it, since that father had also had a father who perhaps suffered from something worse than Edinburgh philosophy. There could be no question of blame. The world was so constructed that Timmis (or Jones) was bound to be out of luck and to fail, just as it seemed to be in the order of creation that he himself, H. J. Beenham, should be comfortable and beyond the reach of the cares most common to mankind. There were fat kine and lean kine, and, come what may, the lean kine would still light upon the meager pasture.

There be fat men and lean men, but men have this advantage over kine, that they can understand and help each other.

So Old Mole nursed his knee and told himself that Timmis was obviously sincere in believing himself to be done for, and therefore for all practical purposes he was done for, and there was no other useful course to pursue than to listen to what further he might have to say, and then, from his point of view, to consider the position and see if there were not something he had overlooked in his excited despair.

Timmis concluded his tale, and nothing had escaped him. His own opinion of his moral condition must be accepted: as to his material state, that could not possibly be worse. He had loved, wooed and won a lady in the chorus upon whom the manager had cast a favorable eye and the light of his patronage. There had been a scene, an altercation, almost blows. Timmis's engagement ceased on the spot, and, as he said, he now understood why actors put up with so much insult, insolence and browbeating on the part of their managers. He had three shillings in his pocket with which to pay his rent and face the world, and he was filled with disgust of women, of the theater, of himself, and would Mr. Mole be so kind as to lend him fifty pounds with which to make a new start in a new country; he believed that in fresh surroundings, thousands of miles away from any philosophy or poetry, or so-called art, he could descend to a lower level of existence, and perhaps, without the intervention of another disastrous love affair, redeem his false start. He was not, he said, asking for something for nothing--no man born and bred in England could ever bring himself to ask for or to expect that!--he was prepared to give security of a sort which only a man of intelligence and knowledge of affairs would accept. He had brought a play with him in typescript. It was called "Lossie Loses." In his time Timmis had written many plays, and they were all worthless except this one. Most of them were good in intention but bad in performance: he had burned them. This was bad in intention but good in execution, and one of these days it would become a considerable property. An agent in London had a copy, he said, and he would write to this man and tell him that he had transferred all his rights to Mr. Mole. He then produced a pompous little agreement assigning his property and stating the consideration, wrote his name on it with a large flourishing hand, and passed it over with the play to his friend in need. After a moment's hesitation, during which he squashed his desire to improve the occasion with a few general remarks, Old Mole thought of the unlucky creature's three shillings and of the deliverance that fifty pounds would be to him, and at once produced his checkbook and wrote out a check.

No man has yet discovered the art of taking a check gracefully. Timmis shuffled it into his pocket, hemmed and ha'd for a few seconds, and then bolted.

Old Mole took up his play and began to read it. It did not interest him, but he could not put it down. There was not a true emotion in it, not a reasonable man or woman, but it was full of surprising tricks and turns and quiddities, was perpetually slopping over from sugary tenderness to shy laughter, and all the false emotions in it were introduced so irrelevantly as never to be thoroughly cloying, and indeed sometimes to give almost that sensation of delighted surprise which comes truly only from the purest and happiest art. Not until it was some moments out of his hands did Old Mole recognize the thing in all its horrid spuriousness. Then he flung it from him, scowled at it, fumed over it, and finally put it away and resolved to think no more about it or of Carlton Timmis.

That night when he met Matilda she was in high delight. The "second girl" was ill; her understudy had been called away to the sick bed of her only surviving aunt, and she had been chosen to play the part at a matinée to see if she could do it. Her name would not be on the program, but she would have ten lines to speak and one verse in a quartet to sing, and a dance with the third comedian. Wasn't it splendid? And couldn't they go and have supper at the new hotel just to celebrate it? All the girls were talking about the hotel, and she had never been to a real restaurant.

It is hard not to feel generous when you have given away fifty pounds, and Old Mole yielded. They had oysters and grilled kidneys, and they drank champagne. Matilda had never tasted it before and she made a little ceremony of it. It was so pretty (she said), such a lovely color, and the bubbles were so funnily busy. He drank too much of it and became amorous. Matilda was wonderfully pretty and amusing in her excitement, and he could not take his eyes off her.

"Tell me," he said, "do you really like this life?"

"I love it. It's something like what I've always wanted to be. In some ways it's better and some ways it's worse."

"I don't see much of you now."

"You like me all the better when you do see me."

"We're not getting on much with your education."

"Education be blowed."

He was distressed and wished she had not said "be blowed." She saw his discomfort and leaned forward and patted his hand.

"Don't you fret, my dear. There's a good time coming."

But unaccountably he was depressed. He was feeling sorry he had brought her. There was a vulgarity, a sensuousness in the glitter and gilt of the restaurant that sorted ill with what in his heart he felt and was proud to feel for Matilda. He was sorry that she liked it, but saw, too, that she could not help but be pleased since to her it was all novel and dazzling. Hardest of all to bear, he was forced to admit that he had no immediate alternative to lay before her.

They drove home in a taxi, and she caressed him and soothed him and told him he was the dearest, kindest, gentlest and most considering husband any girl could have the luck to find. And once again, ominously, he was struck by the strangeness of the word husband on her lips. For a short while he was haunted by the figure of Timmis, with his disgust of women even while he loved one of them. But he shook away from that and told himself that if there was something lacking in his relations with his wife the fault must lie with him, for he at least had a certain scale of spiritual values, while she had none, nor, from her upbringing, could she have had the opportunity of discovering any in herself or her relations with those about her.

She said he thought too much, but without thought, without passionate endeavor, how could marriage fail to sink into brutish habit? Was that too fastidious? Since there is an animal element in human life, were it not as well to deal with it frankly and healthily on an animal level? That offended his logic. There could be no element in life that was not harmonious with every other element. The gross indulgence of sex had always been offensive to him, a stupid protraction of the heated imprisonment of adolescence, a calamity that must result in arrested development. Marriage had forced him to think about these things, and he was determined, so far as in him lay, to think about them clearly, without dragging in literature, or sentiment, or prejudice. In marriage, admittedly, lay the highest spiritual relationship known, or ever to be known, to human beings. In marriage, obviously, the body had its share. If the body's share were regarded as separate from the rest, as an unfortunate but not unpleasant necessity, then, being separate, how could it be anything but a clog upon the full and true union? It was impossible for him to think of sex as a clot in the otherwise free mating of souls, and, indeed, his experience assured him that the exercise of his sex gave him not only the most wonderful deliverance from physical obsessions, but also from the uneasy and unprofitable brooding of the mind.

But he was uneasy and anxious in his marriage, came to believe that it was because his wife was content with so little when he desired to give her so much more, and blamed himself for his apparent inability to set forth his gift of emotion and human fellowship in terms that she could understand.

He went to see her play her part in the pantomime and suffered agonies of nervousness for her. She delivered her ten lines without mishap, sang her part in the quartet inaudibly, and her dance in the duet was applauded so loudly that at last the conductor tapped his little desk, and Matilda came tripping forth again with her comedian, bowed, kissed her hand, and went through the movements--absurd, banal, pointless as they were--with a shy grace and a breathless, childish pleasure that were charming. He was swept into the collective pleasure of the audience and clapped his hands with them and felt that the Matilda there on the stage was not his Matilda, but a creature belonging to another world, of whose existence he was aware, while nothing in his world could have any influence or any bearing on her whatsoever. . . . He would meet her at the stagedoor, and she would be his Matilda, while the other remained behind, as it were, inanimate in her charmed existence. Both were infused with life from the same source of life; the essence passed from one to the other, and therefore there was not one Matilda but three Matildas.

He lost himself in this mystic conception and was timely rescued by her meeting him as he passed through the vestibule. She took his arm and hugged it and asked him if he liked it.

"Wasn't it good getting an encore? That dance has only been encored six times before."

He told her how nervous he had been.

"I wasn't a bit nervous once I was on, but in the wings it was awful."

She said she wanted to take him behind the scenes so that he could see what a real theater was like. They passed through the stagedoor and along narrow, dusty passages, up steep flights of stone stairs, she chatting gaily in spite of the frequent notices enjoining silence, and every now and then they were stopped and Matilda was embraced by male and female alike, and all the women said how glad they were, and the men said: "good egg" or "top hole." Suddenly out of the narrow, dusty ways they came upon the stage, huge and eerie. There was only a faint light, the curtain was up, and there were tiny women in the auditorium dropping white cloths from the galleries and shrouding all the seats. Never had Old Mole had such a sense of emptiness and desolation. A man's voice came from far up above the stage, and it sounded like a thin ghostly mocking. There was a creaking and a rasping, and a great sheet of painted canvas descended, the wings were set in place, and a flight of stairs was wheeled up and clamped: the scene was set for the opening of the pantomime. Suddenly the lights were turned on. Matilda began to hum the opening bars of the overture. Old Mole blinked. He was nearly blinded. The colors in the scenery glowed in the light. He had the most alarming sense of being cut off from his surroundings, of being projected, thrust forward toward the mysterious, empty auditorium with its shrouded seats and the little women bustling up and down in it. Almost irresistibly he was impelled to shout to them, to engage their attention, to make them look at him. His mind eased and a thrill of importance ran through him: never had he seemed to himself to bulk so large. He was almost frightened: the immense power of the machinery, the lighted stage and the darkened auditorium alarmed and weighed crushingly upon him.

"It's like a vault," said Matilda, "with no one in front. But when it's full, on a Saturday night, hundreds and hundreds of faces, it's wonderful."