and Mr. and Mrs. Copas were drinking his health in Dublin stout. They
found him a bed in their lodgings in a surprisingly clean little house
in a grimy street, and they sat up half the night discussing plays and
acting with practical illustrations. He was fascinated by the frank
and childish egoism of the actor and enjoyed firing him with the plots
of the Greek tragedies and as many of the Latin comedies as he could
remember offhand.
"By Jove!" cried Copas. "You'll be worth three pounds a week to me.
Iffyjenny's just the part Mrs. Copas has been looking for all her
life. Ain't it, Carrie?"
But Mrs. Copas was asleep.
In the very early morning the Theater Royal was taken to pieces and
stacked on a great cart. The company packed themselves in and on a
caravan and they set out on their day's journey of thirty miles to a
small town in Staffordshire, in the marketplace of which they were to
give a three weeks' season. Mr. Copas drove the caravan and Mr. Mole
sat on the footboard, and as they threaded their way through the long
suburbs of Thrigsby he passed many a house where he had been a welcome
guest, many a house where he had discussed the future of a boy or an
academic problem, or listened to the talk of the handful of cultured
men attracted to the place by its school and university. How few they
were he had never realized until now. They had seemed important when
he was among them, one of them; their work, his work, had seemed
paramount, the justification of, the excuse for all the alleged
squalor of Thrigsby which he had never explored and had always taken
on hearsay. That Thrigsby was huge and mighty he had always admitted,
but never before had he had any sense of the remoteness from its
existence of himself and his colleagues. It was Thrigsby that had been
remote, Thrigsby that was ungrateful and insensible of the benefits
heaped upon it. There had always been a sort of triumph in retrieving
boys from Thrigsby for culture. He could only think of it now with a
bitterness that fogged his judgment. His discovery of the Flat Iron
Market made him conceive Thrigsby as a city of raw, crude vitality on
which he had for years been engaged in pinning rags and tatters of
knowledge in the pathetic belief that he was giving it the boon of
education--secondary education. And there frothed and bubbled in his
tired mind all the jargon of his old profession. In a sort of waking
nightmare he set preposterous questions in interminable examinations
and added up lists of marks and averaged them with a sliding rule, and
blue-penciled false quantities in Latin verse. . . . And the caravan
jogged on. He looked back over the years, and through them there
trailed a long monotonous stream of boys, who had taken what he had to
give, such as it was, and given nothing in return. He saw his own
futile attempts to keep in touch with them and follow their careers.
They were not worth following. Nine-tenths of them became clerks in
banks and offices, sank into mediocre existences, married, produced
more boys. The mockery of it all! He thought of his colleagues, how,
if they stayed, they lost keenness and zest. How, if they went, it was
to seek security and ease, to marry, to "settle down," and produce
more boys. Over seven hundred boys in the school there were, and all
as alike as peas in a pod, all being taught year in, year out, the
same things out of the same books by the same men. His thoughts wound
slowly round and round and the bitterness in him ate into his soul and
numbed him. The caravan jogged on. He cared nothing where he was,
whither he might be going, what became of him. Only to be moving was
enough, to be moving away from the monotony of boys and the black
overpowering vitality of Thrigsby.
It was not easy for Mr. Copas to be silent and he addressed his new
partner frequently on all manner of subjects, the weather, the horse's
coat, the history of Mr. Fitter, and all with such absorption that
they had gone eight miles and were just passing out of Thrigsby into
its southeast spur of little chimney-dominated villages before he
awoke to the fact that he was receiving no attention.
"Dotty!" he said, with a click of his tongue, and thereafter he fell
to conning new speeches for the favorite parts of his repertory.
Slowly they crawled up a long slope until they rounded the shoulder of
a low rolling hill, from whence the world seemed to open up before
them. Below lay a lake, blue under the vivid sky, gleaming under the
green wooded hills that enclosed it. Beyond rose line upon line of
round hummocky hills. The caravan stopped and with a jolt Mr. Mole
came out of the contemplation of the past when he was known as H. J.
Beenham, and sat gaping down at the lake and the hills. He was
conscious of an almost painful sense of liberation. The view invited
to move on and on, to range over hill after hill to discover what
might lie beyond.
"What hills are those?" he asked.
"You might call them the Pennine Range."
"The backbone of England. That's a school phrase."
"You been asleep? Eh?"
"Not exactly asleep. Kind of cramped."
"You're a funny bloke. I been a-talking to you and you never
listened."
"Didn't I? I'm sorry."
"We water the horses just here."
There was a spring by the roadside and here the caravan drew up. Mrs.
Copas produced victuals and beer. Conversation was desultory.
"Can't do with them there big towns," said Mr. Copas, and Old Mole
then noticed a peculiarity of the actor's wife. Whenever he spoke she
gazed at him with a rapt stupid expression and the last few words of
his sentences were upon her lips almost before they left his. It was
fascinating to watch and the schoolmaster forgot the feeling of
repugnance with which their methods of eating inspired him. He watched
Mrs. Copas and heard her husband, so that every remark was broken up:
"Wouldn't go near them if it weren't for the----"
"Money."
"Give me a bit of cheese and a mug of beer by the----"
"Roadside."
"But the show's got to----"
"Earn its keep."
"Earn its keep. I'm going to sleep. Them as wants to walk on can walk
on."
Mr. Copas rose and went into the caravan and his wife followed him.
The wagon had not yet caught them up.
"Shall we walk on?" said Matilda.
"If it's a straight road."
"Oh! There'll be signposts. We'll maybe find a wood."
So they walked on. She was wearing a blue print frock with the sleeves
rolled up to her elbow. She had very pretty arms.
"I sha'n't stop 'ere long," she said.
"No? Why not?"
"It ain't good enough. Nothing's good enough if you stop too long at
it. Uncle'll never be any different."
"Will any of us ever be different?"
"I shall," she said, and she gave a queer little defiant laugh and her
stride lengthened so that she shot a pace or two ahead of him. She
turned and laughed at him over her shoulder.
"Come along, slowcoach."
He grunted and made an effort, but could not catch her. So they moved
until they came to a little wood with a white gate in the hedges.
Through this she went, he after her, and she flung herself down in the
bracken, and lay staring up through the leaves of the trees. He stood
looking down at her. It was some time before she broke the silence and
said:
"Sit down and smell. Ain't it good? . . . Do you think if you murdered
me now they'd ever find me?"
"What a horrible idea?"
"I often dream I've committed a murder. They say it's lucky. Do you
believe in dreams?"
"Napoleon believed in dreams."
"Who was he?"
"He was born in Corsica, and came to France with about twopence
halfpenny in his pocket. He made himself Emperor before he was forty,
and died in exile."
"Still, he'd had his fling. I'm twenty-one. How old are you?"
"Twice that and more."
"Are you rich or clever or anything like that?"
"No!" he smiled at the question. "Nothing like that."
She sat up and chewed a long grass stalk.
"I'm lucky." She gave a little sideways wag of her chin. "I know I'm
lucky. If only I'd had some education."
"That's not much good to you."
"It makes you speak prop'ly."
That was a view of education never before presented to him. Certainly
the sort of education he had doled out had done little to amend the
speech of his Thrigsbian pupils.
"Is that all you want--to speak properly?"
"Yes. You speak prop-properly."
"Nothing else."
"There is a difference between gentlemen and others. I want to have to
do with gentlemen."
"And ladies?"
"Oh! I'll let the ladies look after theirselves."
"_Them_selves."
"Themselves."
She flushed at the correction and a dogged sulky expression came into
her eyes. She nibbled at the grass stalk until it disappeared into her
mouth. For a moment or two she sat plucking at her lower lip with her
right finger and thumb. Through her teeth she said:
"I _will_ do it."
Contemptuously, with admirable precision, she spat out the grass stalk
against the trunk of a tree.
"Did you ever see a lady do that? You never did. You'll see me do
things you've never seen a lady do. You'll see me---- But you've got
to teach me first. You'll teach me, won't you? . . . You won't go away
until you've taught me? You won't go away?"
"You're the most extraordinary young woman I ever met in my life."
"Did you come to uncle because of me?"
"Eh?"
He stared at her. The idea had not presented itself to him before. She
was not going to allow him to escape it.
"Did you come to uncle because of me?"
He knew that it was so.
"Yes," he said. "Hadn't we better go?"
"Not yet."
She was kneeling beside him mischievously tickling the back of his
hand with a frond of bracken.
"Not yet. Do you remember what you said to me that night?"
"No. What did I say?"
"You said you'd never been in love."
"No more I have."
"Come along then."
The caravan hove in sight as they reached the gate. She joined Mrs.
Copas inside, and he, Mr. Copas, on the footboard. He was filled with
a bubbling humor and was hard put to it not to laugh aloud. He had no
clear memory of the talk in the wood, but he liked the delicious
absurdity of it.
"In love?" he said to himself. "Nonsense."
All the same he could not away with the fact that he had a new zest
and pleasure in contemplating the future. Thrigsby and all its works
fell away behind him and he was glad of his promise to teach the girl.
. . . One girl after hundreds of boys! It had been one of his stock
jests for public dinners in Thrigsby that the masters of the Grammar
School and the mistresses of the High School should change places. No
one had ever taken him seriously until now Fate had done so. Of course
it could not last, this new kind of perambulatory school with one
master and one pupil; the girl was too attractive; she would be
snapped up at once, settle down as a wife and mother before she knew
where she was. In his thoughts he had so isolated himself with her
that old prejudices leaped up in him and gave him an uncomfortable
sense of indiscretion. That, however, he placated with the reminder
that, after all, they were chaperoned by Mrs. Copas.
"That's a fine girl, your niece," he said to Mr. Copas.
"Aye. A handsome bit o' goods. She says to me, she says, 'I want to be
a nactress, uncle,' she says. And I says: 'You begin at the bottom,
young lady, and maybe when you're your aunt's age you'll be doing the
work your aunt does.' They tell me, Mr. Mole, that in London they have
leading ladies in their teens. I've never seen the woman who could
play leads under forty. . . . Good God! Hi! Carrie! Tildy!"
Mr. Mole had fallen from the footboard, flat on his face in the road.
When he came to himself he thought with a precision and clarity that
amounted almost to vision of his first arrival at Oxford, saw himself
eagerly, shyly, stepping down from the train and hurrying through the
crowd of other young men, eager and shy, and meeting school
acquaintances. He remembered with singular acuteness the pang of shame
he had felt on encountering Blazering who was going to Magdalen while
he himself was a scholar of Lincoln. He pursued the stripling who had
been himself out of the station and up past the gaol, feeling
amazingly, blissfully youthful when he put up his hand and found a
stiff beard upon his chin. Gone was the vision of Oxford, gone the
sensation of youth, and he realized that he was in bed in a stranger's
room, which, without his glasses, he could not see distinctly. There
was a woman by his bedside, a stout woman, with a strong light behind
her, so that he could not distinguish her features. It was a very
little room, low in the ceiling. The smell of it was good. It had one
small window, which was open, and through it there came up the hubbub
of voices and the grinding beat and blare of a mechanical organ that
repeated one tune so quickly that it seemed always to be afraid it
would not have time to reach the end before it began again. The woman
was knitting. He tried to remember who she might be, but failing, and
feeling mortified at his failure, he consoled himself with the
reflection that he was ill--ill-in-bed, one of the marked degrees of
sickness among schoolboys. How ill? He had never been ill in his life.
"Can I have my spectacles?" he said.
"Oh!" The knitting in the woman's hands went clattering to the floor.
"Lor'! Mr. Mole, you did give me a start. I shall have the
palpitations, same as my mother. My mother had the palpitations for
forty years and then she died of something else."
"If I had my spectacles I could see who it is speaking."
"It's Mrs. Copas. Don't you know me, Mr. Mole?"
"I--er. I . . . . This is your house?"
"It's lodgings, Mr. Mole. You've been sick, Mr. Mole, you have.
Prostrated on your back for nearly a week, Mr. Mole. You did give us
all a turn, falling off the caravan like that into the King's high
road. You'd never believe the pool of blood you left in the road, Mr.
Mole. But it soon dried up. . . ."
He began to have a glimmering, dimly to remember, a road, a caravan, a
horse's tail, dust, a droning voice behind him, but still the name of
Copas meant nothing to him.
"Copas! Copas!" he said to himself, but aloud.
Mrs. Copas produced the spectacles and placed them on his nose. Then
she leaned over him in his bed and in the loud indulgent voice with
which the unafflicted humor the deaf, she said:
"Yes! Mrs. Copas. Matilda's aunt. _You know."_
That brought the whole adventure flooding back.
Matilda! The girl who wanted to speak properly, the girl whom he had
found in the smelly little theater. No! Not in the theater! In the
train! He writhed and went hot, and his head began to throb, and he
felt a strange want of coördination among the various parts of his
body.
"I'm afraid," he said, "I'm afraid I _am_ ill."
"There! There!" said Mrs. Copas. "We'll soon pull you round. I'm used
to the nursing; not that Mr. Copas is ever ill. He says a nartist
can't afford to be ill, but we had a comic once who used to have
fits."
"It's very good of you. I must have been an incubus. I'm sure I must
be taking you away from the theater."
"We've got a new tune on the organ and we're doing splendid business.
Mr. Copas _will_ be glad to hear you've asked for your spectacles.
. . . Doctor says you mustn't talk."
And, indeed, he had lost all desire to do so. His head ached so that
he could not keep his eyes open, nor think, nor hear anything but a
confused buzz, and he sank back into the luxury of feeling sorry for
himself.
Nothing broke in upon that sensation until suddenly the organ stopped.
That startled him and set him listening. In the distance, muffled, he
could hear the huge booming voice of Mr. Copas, but not what he said.
"Nice people," he thought. "Nice kind people."
There were three medicine bottles by his bed-side. They suddenly
caught his eye and he gazed at them long and carefully. One was full
and two were half empty. Their contents were brown, reddish, and
white.
"I must be very ill," he said to himself mournfully. There darted in
on him a feeling of fun. "No one knows! I am ill and no one knows. Not
a soul knows. They won't know. They won't ever know."
That seemed to settle it. "They" sank away. He hurled defiance after
them, opened, as it were, a trap-door in the past, and gloated over
the sight of "them" hurtling down and down. He felt better after that.
The pain in his head was almost gone. His bed seemed to be floating,
drifting, turning on the tide, while it was moored to Mrs. Copas. He
gazed at her and saw in her the comfortable, easy, hovering present.
He had only to cut the painter to drift out into the wide future. When
he opened his mouth to tell Mrs. Copas that he remembered her
perfectly she laid her finger on her lips and said "Ssh!" and when he
insisted on grunting out a word, she smacked the back of her fat hand
roguishly and cried:
"Naughty!"
At that he giggled helplessly and went on giggling until he was near
crying.
"Histrionics!" said Mrs. Copas, and gave him brandy.
Matilda appeared at the door and was pushed out. At that Mr. Mole, who
had seen her, began to weep and sobbed like a disappointed child, and
went on sobbing until Matilda was allowed to come in and sit by his
side. She sat on the bed, and he stopped his sobbing as abruptly as a
horse will come to a standstill after a mad sunset gallop. Mrs. Copas
left them.
Matilda sat stroking her cheek and gazing at him. She cocked her head
on one side and said:
"Glad you're better, but I don't like men with beards. Napoleon didn't
have a beard."
"How do you know?"
"I bought a book about him for a penny. I like Josephine."
"I don't know much about it, but I always felt sorry for her."
"She gave as good as she got. That's why I like her. . . . I had a
part to do to-night."
"A long part?"
"No. I just had to say to uncle, 'Won't you give her another chance?'
His erring wife had just returned to him."
"Did you do it well?"
"No. Uncle said no one who wasn't at the back of the stage could hear
me."
"Oh! Did you like it?"
"Yes. I felt funny like."
Mr. Mole coughed. Matilda stopped.
"What did I say?"
"Funny like."
"Don't people say that?"
"It is unusual."
"Oh!"
"I wasn't a bit nervous. Uncle says that's a bad sign. He says I
looked all right, though I'm sure I was an object with that paint
stuff on my face and the red all in the wrong place. Aunt wouldn't let
me do it myself. . . . You will cut your beard off?"
"I don't know. I might like it."
She handed him a mirror, and mischief danced in her eyes as she
watched his disconcerted expression. "Bit of a surprise, eh?"
He could find nothing to say. Impossible for him to lay the mirror
down. For years he had accepted a certain idea of his personal
appearance--ruddy, heavy-jowled, with a twinkle behind spectacles
surmounted by a passably high forehead that was furrowed by the lines
of a frown almost deliberately cultivated for the purposes of
inspiring terror in small boys delinquent. Now, in the sharpened
receptivity of his issue from unconsciousness, his impression was one
of roundness, round face, round eyes, round brow, round head (balder
than he had thought)--all accentuated by the novelty of his beard,
that was gray, almost white. Age and roundness. Fearful of meeting
Matilda's gaze, he went on staring into the mirror. Her youth, the fun
bubbling up in her, reproached him, made him feel defenceless against
her, and, though he delighted in her presence, he was resentful. She
had so many precious qualities to which he could not respond.
"I 'spect I must go now," she said.
"Yes. I'm rather tired."
She took the mirror from him, patted his hand, and soothed him,
saying:
"You'll soon be up and doing, and then you'll begin to teach me, won't
you?"
"How would it be if you came and read to me every evening before the
play? Then we could begin at once."
"Shall I?" She warmed to the plan. "What shall I read?"
"You might read your book about Napoleon."
"Oh! Lovely!"
Mrs. Copas returned to give him his medicine and to tuck him up for
the night.
"What day is it?" he asked.
"Saturday."
"Are there any letters for me?" He remembered then that there could be
none, that he was no longer his old self, that an explosion in his
affairs had hurled him out of his old habitual existence and left him
bruised and broken among strangers.
"I would like," he said, "to shave to-morrow."
"Yes, yes," replied Mrs. Copas, humoring him. "I'm in the next room if
you want anything. Doctor said you was to have as much sleep as you
could get. Being Saturday night, and you an invalid, Mr. Copas bought
you some grapes and sponge-cake, and he wants to know if you'd like
some port wine. We thought it 'ud make you sleep."
He expressed a desire for port, and she bustled into the next room and
came back with a tumblerful. He was, or fancied he was, something of a
connoisseur, and he propped himself up and sipped the dark liquid,
and, as he was wont, rolled it round his tongue. It tasted of ink and
pepper. He wanted to spit it out, but, blinking up at Mrs. Copas, he
saw the good creature beaming at him in rapt indulgence, and could not
bring himself to offend her. With his gorge rising he sipped down
about a third of the tumbler's contents and then feebly, miserably
held it out toward her.
"A bit strong for you?"
He nodded, drew the bed-clothes up over his shoulders and feigned
sleep. The light was put out and he heard Mrs. Copas creep into the
next room. Sleep? The fiery liquor sent the blood racing and throbbing
through his veins. The palms of his hands were dry and hot, and his
head seemed to be bulging out of its skin. His ears were alert to
every sound, and to every sound his nerves responded with a thrill. He
could hear footsteps on the cobbles of the street outside, voices,
hiccoughs, a woman's voice singing. These were the accompaniment to
nearer sounds, a duet in the next room, a deep bass muttering, and a
shrill argumentative treble. The bass swelled into anger. The treble
roared into pleading. The bass became a roar, the treble a squeak. It
was exciting, exasperating. In his bed Beenham tossed from side to
side. He did not want to listen to their altercation, but sleep would
not come to him. The bass voice broke into a crackling; then
spluttering, furious sounds came. The treble squealed pitifully. Came
the thud and smack of a fist on flesh and bone, a gasp, a whine, a
whimper, another thud and smack, and growls from the bass, then
silence. . . .
Sick at heart Old Mole lay in his bed staring, staring into the
darkness, and the blood in him boiled and bubbled, and his skin was
taut and he shivered. He had heard of men beating their wives, but as
one hears of the habits of wild animals in African forests; he had
thought of it as securely as here in England one may think of a
man-eating tiger near an Indian village. Now, here, in the next room,
the thing had happened. Manliness, that virtue which at school had
been held up as the highest good, bade him arise and defend the woman.
In theory manliness had always had things perfectly its own way. In
practice, now, sound sense leaped ahead of virtue, counted the cost
and accurately gauged the necessity of action. In the first place to
defend Mrs. Copas would mean an intrusion into the sanctuary of human
life, the conjugal chamber; in the second place, in spite of many
familiar pictures of St. George of Cappadocia (subsequently of
England), it would be embarrassing to defend Mrs. Copas in her night
attire; in the third place, the assault had grown out of their
altercation of which he had heard nothing whatever; and, lastly, it
might be a habit with Mr. and Mrs. Copas to smite and be smitten.
Therefore Old Mole remained in his bed, faintly regretting the failure
of manliness, fighting down his emotion of disgust, and endeavoring to
avoid having to face his position. In vain: shunning all further
thought of the miserable couple in the next room, he was driven back
upon himself, to his wretched wondering:
"What have I done?"
He had thrown up his very pleasant life in Thrigsby and Bigley, a
life, after all, of some consequence, for what? . . . For the society
of a disreputable strolling player who was blind with conceit, was apt
to get drunk on Saturday nights, and in that condition violently to
assault the wife of his bosom. And he had entered into this adventure
with enthusiasm, had seen their life as romantic and adventurous,
deliberately closing his eyes to the brutality and squalor of it.
Thud, whack! and there were the raw facts staring him in the face.
There came a little moaning from the next room: never a sound from the
bass: and soon all was still, save for the mice in the skirting board
and occasional footsteps on the cobbles of the street outside.