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.
They went behind and found her hot and flustered, painted, and half
out of the gipsy dress in which she had made her last appearance. When
she saw Mrs. Boothroyd she gave a cry of delight, rushed to her and
flung her arms round her neck and kissed her.
"Didn't Jimmy come, too?"
"No; Jimmy was at the works, and couldn't come."
Matilda asked after all the Boothroyd children and her own brothers
and sisters, and all their illnesses and minor disasters were
retailed. Mr. and Mrs. Copas came in and embraced Bertha Boothroyd,
whom they had not seen since she was a little girl, and when she said
how proud she was of Matilda they replied that she had every reason to
be. John Lomas appeared with stout and biscuits, and the occasion was
celebrated. Warmed by this conviviality, Mrs. Boothroyd invited them
all to tea with her on the next day but one, then, alarmed at the
thought of what she had done, gave a little frightened gasp, was pale
and silent for a few moments, and at last said she must be home to
give Jim his supper when he came back.
She kissed and was kissed. Her disquietude had blown the high spirits
of the party. When she had gone Matilda said:
"Jim's a devil. Bertha's had a baby every year since she was married,
and he thinks of nothing but saving his own soul."
Next day came a note from Bertha saying she was afraid her little
house would not accommodate the whole party, but would Matilda bring
her husband. "Is Mr. Mole an actor?" she asked. "I told Jim he
wasn't."
Bertha's address was 33 June Street. It was a long journey by tram,
and then Matilda and her husband had to walk nearly a mile down a
monotonous road intersected with little streets. The name of the road
was Pretoria Avenue, and on one side the little streets were called
after the months of the year, and on the other after the twelve
Apostles. The Boothroyds therefore lived in the very heart of the
product of the end of the nineteenth century. Their front door opened
straight on to the street, they had a little yard at the back, and
their house consisted of eight rooms. The parlor door was unlocked for
the visit, and, amid photographs of many Boothroyds, testimonials to
the worthiness of James Boothroyd and his Oddfellows' certificate, tea
was laid, none of your proper Yorkshire teas, but afternoon tea with
thin bread and butter. Five little Boothroyds in clean collars and
pinafores were placed round the room, and stared alternately at the
cake on the table and their aunt and their new uncle. Old Mole
endeavored to avoid their gaze, but the room seemed full of round
staring gray eyes, and when he considered the corpulent American organ
that took up the whole wall opposite the fireplace, he was astonished
that so many people could be crammed into so small a space. Then he
estimated that there were at least sixty other exactly similar houses
in the street, that from January to December there were streets in
replica, not to mention those on the other side of the road which were
named from John to--surely not to Judas? He remembered then that one
street was called Paul Street. . . . Dozens and dozens of houses, each
with its Boothroyd family and its American organ. Dejectedly he told
himself that these were the poor, until, glancing across at Matilda,
he remembered that it was from such a house, among dozens of such
houses, that she had come. That thought colored his survey, and he
reminded himself, as nearly always he was forced to do when
considering her actions or any episode in her history, that his own
comfortable middle-class standards were not at all proper to the
consideration of the phenomena of mean streets. Desperately anxious to
make himself pleasant to Matilda's sister, he asked heavily:
"Are these all----?"
She was in such a flutter that she did not leave him time to finish
his sentence, took him to be referring to the children, and said:
"Yes, they were all hers, and there were two more in the kitchen."
With more tact Matilda cut the cake and gave a piece to each of the
five children. Mrs. Boothroyd said she was spoiling them, and Matilda
retorted:
"If they're good children you can't spoil them."
And the children giggled crumbily and presently they sidled and edged
up to their aunt and began to finger her and pluck at her clothes.
Seeing his wife so set Old Mole off on an entirely new train of
thought and feeling, and he began to contrast the Copas atmosphere
with this domestic interior. Very queerly it gave a sort of life to
that crusted old formula that had, with so many others, gone by the
board in his eruption from secondary education, wherein it was laid
down that a woman's place is her home. He could never, without
discomfort, apply any formula to Matilda, but to see her there, with
the bloom on her, in her full beauty, with the five little children at
her knees, made this idea so attractive that he was loath to
relinquish it: nor did he do so until Matilda asked if she might see
the house, when she and Mrs. Boothroyd and the five children left him
alone with the ruins of the cake and the American organ.