room to show him, shivering, its meanness and poverty. It sickened
him, but when in reaction he came to consider his old mode of living
that seemed so paltry as to give a sort of savor to the coarseness of
this. . . . Anyhow, he reflected, he was tied to his bed, could not
take any action, and must wait upon circumstance, and hope only that
there might not be too many violent shocks in store for him.
Mrs. Copas bore the marks of her husband's attentions: a long bruise
over her right eye and down to the cheek-bone, and a cut on her upper
lip which had swelled into an unsightly protuberance. Her spirit
seemed to be entirely unaffected, and she beamed upon him from behind
her temporary deformities. When she asked him if he had slept well, he
lied and said he had slept like a top.
She brought him hot water, razor, brush and soap, and he shaved. Off
came his beard, and, after long scrutiny of his appearance in the
mirror and timid hesitation, he removed the moustache which had been
his pride and anxiety during his second year at Oxford, since when it
had been his constant and unobtrusive companion. The effect was
startling. His upper lip was long and had, if the faces of great men
be any guide, the promise of eloquence. There was a new expression in
his face, of boldness, of firmness, of--as he phrased it
himself--benevolent obstinacy. His changed countenance gave him so
much pleasure that he spent the morning gazing into the mirror at
different angles. With such a brow, such an upper lip, such lines
about the nose and chin, it seemed absurd that he should have spent
twenty-five years as an assistant master in a secondary school. Then
he laughed at himself as he realized that he was behaving as he had
not done since the ambitious days at Oxford when he had endeavored to
decide on a career. Ruefully he remembered that in point of fact he
had not decided. With a second in Greats he had taken the first
appointment that turned up. His history had been the history of
thousands. One thing only he had escaped--marriage, the ordinary
timid, matter-of-fact, sugar-coated marriage upon means that might or
might not prove sufficient. After that, visiting his friends' houses,
he had sighed sentimentally, but, with all the eligible women of his
acquaintance--and they were not a few--he had been unable to avoid a
quizzical tone which forbade the encouragement of those undercurrents
upon which, he had observed, middle-aged men were swept painlessly
into matrimony. . . . Pondering his clean-shaven face in the mirror he
felt oddly youthful and excited.
In the evening Matilda came as she had promised, with the book, which
proved to be that Life of Napoleon by Walter Scott which so incensed
Heine. The sun shone in at the window upon the girl's brown hair, and
as she opened the book the church bells began to ring with such an
insistent buzzing that it was impossible for her to read. As he lay in
bed Old Mole thought of Heine lying in his mattress-grave, being
visited by his _Mouche,_ just such another charming creature as this,
young and ardent, and by her very presence soothing; only he was no
poet, but a man dulled by years of unquestioning service. He gazed at
Matilda as he could not recollect ever having gazed at a woman,
critically, but with warm interest. There was a kind of bloom on her,
the fragrance and graciousness that, when he had encountered it as a
young man, had produced in him a delicious blurring of the senses, an
almost intoxication wherein dreadfully he had lost sight of the
individual in the possession of them, and considered her only as
woman. Now his subjection to the spell only heightened his sense of
Matilda's individuality and sharpened his curiosity about her. Also it
stripped him of his preoccupation with himself and his own future, and
he fell to considering hers and wondering what the world might hold
for her. . . . Like most men he had his little stock of
generalizations about women, how they were mysterious, capricious,
cruel, unintelligent, uncivilized, match-making, tactless, untruthful,
etc., but to Matilda he could not apply them. He wanted to know
exactly how she personally felt, thought, saw, moved, lived, and he
refused to make any assumption about her. This curiosity of his was
not altogether intellectual: it was largely physical, and it grew. He
was annoyed that he had not seen her come into the room to mark how
she walked, and to procure this satisfaction he asked her to give him
a glass of water. He watched her. She walked easily with, for a woman,
a long stride and only a very slight swing of the hips, and a drag of
the arms that pleased him mightily. As she gave him the glass of water
she said:
"You do look nice. I knew you would, without that moustache."
She had a strong but pleasant North-Country accent, and in her voice
there was a faint huskiness that he found very moving, though it was
only later, when he analyzed the little thrills which darted about him
in all his conversations with her, that he set it down to her voice.
. . . She resumed her seat by the foot of his bed with her book in her
hand, and his physical curiosity waxed only the greater from the
satisfaction he had given it. He could find no excuse for more, and
when the bells ceased he took refuge in talk.
"Where were you born, Matilda?"
"In a back street," she said. "Father was a fitter, and mother was a
dressmaker, but she died, and father got the rheumatism, so as we all
'ad--had--to work. There was----"
"Were." She blushed and looked very cross.
"Were three girls and two boys. Jim has gone to Canada, and George is
on the railway, and both my sisters are married, one in the country,
and one in Yorkshire. I'm the youngest."
"Did you go to school?"
"Oh! yes. Jackson Street, but I left when I was fourteen to go into a
shop. That was sitting still all day and stitching, or standing all
day behind a counter with women coming in and getting narked----"
"Getting what?"
"Narked--cross-like."
"I see. So you didn't care about that?"
"No. There is something in me here"--she laid her hand on her
bosom--"that goes hot and hard when I'm not treated fair, and then I
don't care a brass farthing what 'appens."
She was too excited as she thought of her old wrongs to correct the
last dropped aitch, though she realized it and bit her lip.
"I been in service three years now, and I've been in four places. I've
had enough."
"And what now?"
"I shall stop 'ere as long as you do."
Something in her tone, a greater huskiness, perhaps, surprised him,
and he looked up at her and met her eyes full. He was confused and
amazed and startled, and his heart grew big within him, but he could
not turn away. In her expression there was a mingling of fierce
strength, defiance, and that helplessness which had originally
overcome him and led to his undoing. He was frightened, but
deliciously, so that he liked it.
"I didn't know," she said, "that uncle drank. Father drank, too. There
was a lot in our street that did. I'm not frightened of many things,
but I am of that."
He resented the topic on her lips and, by way of changing the subject,
suggested that she should read. She turned to her book and read aloud
the first five pages in a queer, strained, high-pitched voice that he
knew for a product of the Board School, where every variance of the
process called education is a kind of stiff drill. When she came to
the end of a paragraph he took the book and read to her, and she
listened raptly, for his diction was good. After he had come to the
end of the first chapter she asked for the book again and produced a
rather mincing but wonderfully accurate copy of his manner. She did
not wait for his comment but banged the book shut, threw it on the
bed, and said:
"That's better. I knew I could do it. I knew I was clever. . . .
You'll stop 'ere for a bit when you're better. You mustn't mind uncle.
I'll be awfully nice to you, I will. I'll be a servant to you and make
you comfortable, and I won't ask for no wages. . . ."
"My dear child," replied Old Mole, "you can't possibly have enjoyed it
more than I."
She was eager on that.
"Did you really, really like it?"
"I did really."
So began the education of Matilda. At first he drew up, for his own
use, a sort of curriculum--arithmetic, algebra, geography, history,
literature, grammar, orthography--and a time-table, two hours a day
for six days in the week, but he very soon found that she absolutely
refused to learn anything that did not interest her, and that he had
to adapt his time to hers. Sometimes she would come to him for twenty
minutes; sometimes she would devote the whole afternoon to him. When
they had galloped through Oman's "History of England" she declined to
continue that study, and after one lesson in geography she burned the
primer he had sent her out to buy. When he asked her where Ipswich was
she turned it over in her mind, decided that it had a foreign sound
and plumped for Germany. She did not seem to mind in the least when he
told her it was in England, in the Eastern Counties. . . . On the
other hand, when he procured their itinerary for the next few months
from Mr. Copas and marked it out on the map for her, she was keenly
interested and he seized on the occasion to point out Ipswich and,
having engaged her attention, all the county towns of England and
Scotland.
"Where were you born?" she asked.
He found the village in Lincolnshire.
"And did you go to a boarding-school?"
He pointed to Haileybury and then to Oxford. From there he took her
down the river to London, and told her how it was the capital of the
greatest Empire the world had ever seen, and how the Mother of
Parliaments sat by the river and made decrees for half the world, and
how the King lived in an ugly palace within sight of the Mother of
Parliaments, and how it was the greatest of ports, and how in
Westminster Abbey all the noblest of men lay buried. She was not
interested and asked:
"Where's the Crystal Palace, where they play the Cup-tie?"
He did not know where in London, or out of it, the Crystal Palace
might be, and she was delighted to find a gap in his knowledge. On the
whole she took her lessons very seriously, and he found that he could
get her to apply herself to almost any subject if he promised that at
the end of it she should be allowed to read. . . . Teaching under
these circumstances he found more difficult than ever he had imagined
it could be. In his Form-room by the glass roof of the gymnasium he
had been backed by tradition, the ground had been prepared for him in
the lower Forms; there was the whole complicated machinery of the
school to give him weight and authority. Further, the subjects of
instruction were settled for him by the Oxford and Cambridge
Examination Board. Now he was somewhat nettled to find that, though he
might draw up and amend curricula, he was more and more forced to take
the nature and extent of his teaching from his pupil, who, having no
precise object in view, followed only her instinct, and that seemed to
bid her not so much to lay up stores of knowledge as to disencumber
herself, to throw out ballast, everything that impeded the buoyancy of
her nature.
They were very pleasant hours for both of them, and in her company he
learned to give as little thought to the future as she. At first,
after he recovered, he fidgeted because there were no letters. Day
after day passed and brought him no communication from the outside
world. Being a member of many committees and boards, he was used to a
voluminous if uninteresting post. However, he got used to their
absence, and what with work in the theater and teaching Matilda he had
little time for regret or anxiety. He had been up from his bed a whole
week before he bought a newspaper, that which he had been in the habit
of reading in his morning train. It was dull and only one announcement
engaged his attention; the advertisement of the school setting forth
the fees and the opening date of the next term--September 19. That
gave him four weeks in which freely to enjoy his present company.
Thereafter surely there would be investigation, inquiry for him, the
scandal would reach his relatives and they would--would they
not?--cause a search for him. Till then he might be presumed to be
holiday-making.
Meanwhile he had grown used to Mr. Copas's manner of living--the dirt,
the untidiness, the coarse food, the long listlessness of the day, the
excitement and feverishness of the evening. Mrs. Copas's
disfigurements were long in healing, and when he was well enough he
replaced her at the door and took the money, and sold the
grimy-thumbed tickets for the front seats. He sat through every
performance and became acquainted with every item in Mr. Copas's
repertory. With that remarkable person he composed a version of
"Iphigenia," for from his first sketch of the play Mr. Copas had had
his eye on Agamemnon as a part worthy of his powers. Mr. Mole insisted
that Matilda should play the part of Iphigenia, and Mrs. Copas was
given Clytemnestra wherewith to do her worst. . . . The only portion
of the piece that was written was Iphigenia's share of her scenes with
Agamemnon. These Old Mole wrote out in as good prose as he could
muster, and she learned them by heart. Unfortunately they were too
long for Mr. Copas, and when it came to performance--there were only
two rehearsals--he burst into them with his gigantic voice and hailed
tirades at his audience about the bitterness of ingratitude in a fair
and favorite daughter, trounced Clytemnestra for the lamentable
upbringing she had given their child, and, in the end, deprived
Iphigenia of the luxury of slaughter by falling on his sword and
crying:
"Thus like a Roman and a most unhappy father I die of thrice and
doubly damned, self-inflicted wounds. By my example let all men,
especially my daughter, know there is a canon fixed against
self-slaughter."
He made nonsense of the whole thing, but it was wonderfully effective.
So far as it was at all lucid the play seemed to represent Agamemnon
as a wretched man driven to a miserable end by a shrewish wife and
daughter.
Much the same fate attended Mr. Mole's other contribution to the
repertory, a Napoleonic drama in which Mr. Copas figured--immensely to
his own satisfaction--as the Corsican torn between an elderly and
stout Marie Louise and a youthful and declamatory Josephine. Through
five acts Mr. Copas raged and stormed up and down the Emperor's
career, had scenes with Josephine and Marie Louise when he felt like
it, confided his troubles and ambitions to Murat when he wanted a rest
from his ranting, sacked countries, cities, ports as easily and neatly
as you or I might pocket the red at billiards, made ponderous love to
the golden-haired lady of the Court, introduced comic scenes with the
lugubrious young man, wept over the child, dressed up as L'Aiglon,
whom he called "Little Boney," banished Josephine from the Court, and
died on the battlefield of Waterloo yielding up his sword to the Duke
of Wellington, represented by Mr. Mole, his first appearance upon any
stage, with this farewell:
"My last word to England is--be good to Josephine."
It was the Theater Royal's most successful piece. The inhabitants of
that little Staffordshire town had heard of the Duke of Wellington and
they applauded him to the echo. Every night when they played that
stirring drama, after Mr. Copas had taken his fill of the applause,
there were calls for the Duke, and Mr. Mole would appear leading
Josephine by the hand.
At the top of their success Mr. Copas decided to move on.
"In this business," he said, "you have to know when to go. You have to
leave 'em ripe for the next visit, and go away and squeeze another
orange. I said to Mrs. Copas, the night you came, that you looked like
luck. You've done it. If you'll stay, sir, I'll give you a pound a
week. You're a nartist, you are. That Wellington bit of yours without
a word to say--d'you know what we call that? We call that 'olding the
stage. It takes a nartist to do that."
Mr. Mole took this praise with becoming modesty and said that he would
stay, for the present. Then he added:
"And about Matilda?"
"She's my own niece," replied Mr. Copas, "but I don't mind telling you
that she's not a bit o' good. She ain't got the voice. She ain't got
the fizzikew. When there's a bit o' real acting to be done, she isn't
there. She just isn't there. There's a hole where she ought to be. I'm
bothered about that girl, I am, bothered. She doesn't earn her keep."
"I thought she was very charming."
"Pretty and all that, but that's not acting. Set her against Mrs.
Copas and where is she?"
Mr. Mole's own private opinion was that on the stage Mrs. Copas was
repulsive. However, he kept that to himself. Very quietly he said:
"If Matilda goes, I go."
Mr. Copas looked very mysterious and winked at him vigorously. Then he
grinned and held out a dirty hand.
"Put it there, my boy, put it there. What's yours?"
Within half an hour he had coaxed another ten pounds out of Mr. Mole's
pocket and Matilda's tenure of the part of Josephine was guaranteed.
At their next stopping-place, on the outskirts of the Pottery towns,
disaster awaited the company. A wheel of the caravan jammed as they
were going down a hill and delayed them for some hours, so that they
arrived too late in the evening to give a performance. Mr. Copas
insisted that the theater should be erected, and lashed his assistants
with bitter and blasphemous words, so that they became excited and
flurried and made a sad muddle of their work. When at last it was
finished and Mr. Copas went out himself to post up his bills on the
walls of the neighborhood, where of all places he regarded his fame as
most secure, he had got no farther than the corner of the square when
he came on a gleaming white building that looked as though it were
made of icing sugar, glittering and dazzling with electric light and
plastered all over with lurid pictures of detectives and criminals and
passionate men and women in the throes of amorous catastrophes and
dilemmas. He stopped outside this place and stared it up and down,
gave it his most devastating fore-and-aft look, and uttered one word:
"Blast!"
Then unsteadily he made for the door of the public-house adjoining it
and called for the landlord, whom he had known twenty years and more.
From the platform of the theater Mrs. Copas saw him go in, and she
rushed to find Mr. Mole, and implored him to deliver her husband from
the seven devils who would assuredly possess him unless he were
speedily rescued and sent a-billposting.
Mr. Mole obeyed, and found the actor storming at the publican, asking
him how he dare take the bread from the belly and the air from the
nostrils of a nartist with a lot o' dancing dotty pictures. With
difficulty Mr. Copas was soothed and placated. He had ordered a glass
of beer in order to give himself a status in the house, and the
publican would not let him pay for it. Whereupon he spilled it on the
sanded floor and stalked out. Mr. Mole followed him and found him
brooding over a poster outside the "kinema" which represented a lady
in the act of saving her child from a burning hotel. He seized his
paste-pot, took out a bill from his satchel, and covered the heads of
the lady and her child with the announcement of his own arrival with
new plays and a brilliant and distinguished company.
When he was safely round the corner he seized his companion by the arm
and said excitedly:
"Ruining the country they are with them things. Last time I pitched
opposite one o' them, when they ought to have been working my own
company was in there watching the pictures."
"I have always understood," replied Mr. Mole, "that they have a
considerable educational value, and certainly it seems to me that
through them the people can come by a more accurate knowledge of the
countries and customs of the world than by reading or verbal
instruction."
Mr. Copas snorted:
"Have you _seen_ 'em?"
"No."
"Then talk when you have. I say it's ruining the country and pampering
the public. Who wants to know about the countries and customs of the
world? What men and women want to know is the workings of the human
heart."
Unexpectedly Mr. Mole found himself reduced to triteness. The only
comment that presented itself to his mind was that the human heart was
a mystery beyond knowing, but that did not allow him to controvert the
actor's dictum that no one wanted to know about the countries and
customs of the world, and he wondered whether the kinematograph did,
in fact, convey a more accurate impression of the wonders of the world
than Hakluyt or Sir John Mandeville, who did, at any rate, present the
results of their travels and inventions with that pride in both truth
and lying which begets style.
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.