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."
To him it was not at all like a vault, but like an engine disconnected
from its power. The mind abhors a vacuum, and he was striving to fill
the emptiness all about him, thronging the auditorium with imaginary
people, and struggling to occupy the magic area of light in which he
stood. In vain: he was impotent. He felt trapped.
"Let us go," he said.
On the stairs they met the manager.
"Hullo, Tilly," he said. "You're a good girl."
"Thanks."
Old Mole hated the young man, for he was common and loose in manner
and in no way worthy of the enchanted Matilda or of the marvelous
organism, the theater, in which she seemed to live so easily and
freely.
His thoughts were much too confused for him to impart them to her, and
he was vastly relieved when they left the theater and she became his
Matilda.
That night he read to her. He had been delighting in "Lucretius," and
he had marked passages, and he turned to that beginning:
"Iam iam non domus accipiet te læta, neque uxor Optima. . . ."
He translated for her:
" 'Now no more shall a glad home and a true wife welcome thee, nor
darling children race to snatch thy first kisses and touch thy heart
with a sweet silent content; no more mayest thou be prosperous in thy
doings and a defence to thine own; alas and woe!' say they, 'one
disastrous day has taken all these prizes of thy life away from
thee'--but thereat they do not add this, 'and now no more does any
longing for these things assail thee.' This did their thought but
clearly see and their speech follow they would deliver themselves from
much burning of the heart and dread. 'Thou, indeed, as thou art sunk
in the sleep of death, wilt so be for the rest of the ages, severed
from all weariness and pain.' . . .
"Yet again, were the nature of things to utter a voice and thus with
her own lips upbraid one of us, 'What ails thee, O mortal, that thou
fallest into such vain lamentation? Why weep and wail at death? For
has thy past life and overspent been sweet to thee, and not all the
good thereof, as though poured into a cracked pitcher, has run through
and perished without joy, why dost thou not retire like a banqueter
filled with life, and, calmly, O fool, take thy sleep? But if all thou
hast had is perished and spilled and thy life is hateful, why seekest
thou yet to add more which shall once again all perish and fall
joylessly away? Why not rather make an end of life and labor? For
there is nothing more that I can contrive and invent for thy delight;
all things are the same forever. Even were thy body not yet withered,
nor thy limbs weary and worn, yet all things remain the same, didst
thou live on through all the generations. Nay, even wert thou never
doomed to die'--what is our answer?"
"Don't you believe in God?" asked Matilda.
It came like a question from a child, and he had the adult's
difficulty in answering it, the doubt as to the interpretation that
will be put upon his reply.
"I believe," he said slowly, "in the life everlasting, but my life has
a beginning and an end."
"And you don't think you go to Heaven or Hell when you're--when you're
dead?"
"Into the ground," he said.
Matilda shivered, and she looked crushed and miserable.
"Why did you read that to me?" she said at last. "I was so happy
before. . . . I've always had a feeling that you weren't like ordinary
people."
And she seemed to wait for him to say something, but his mind harped
only on the words: "For there is nothing more that I can contrive and
invent for thy delight," and he said nothing. She rose wearily and
took her hat and coat and the musquash collar that had been her pride,
and left him.
For hours he sat over the fire, brooding, flashing occasionally into
clear logical sequences of thought, but for the most part browsing and
drowsing, turning over in his mind women and marriage and the theater
and genius, the authentic voice of the nature of things, the spirit of
the universe that sweeps into a man's brain and heart and burns away
all the thoughts of his own small life and fills him with a music that
rings out and resounds and echoes and falls for the most part upon
deaf ears or upon ears filled only with the clatter of the marketplace
or the sweet whisperings of secret, treacherous desires. And he
thought of the engines in that city, day and night, ceaselessly
humming and throbbing, weaving stuffs and forging tools and weapons
for the clothing and feeding of the bodies of men: the terrifying
ingenuity of it all, the force and the skill, the ceaseless division
and subdivision of labor, the multiplication of processes, the
ever-increasing variety of possessions and outward shows and material
things. But through all the changes in the activities of men, behind
all their new combinations of forces "all things are the same forever
and ever. . . ." He remembered then that he had hurt Matilda, that she
had resented his not being "like ordinary people," resented, that is,
his acceptance of the unchanging order of things, his refusal to
confuse surface change with the mighty ebb and flow of life. It was,
he divined, that she had never reached up to any large idea and had
never conceived of any life, individual or general, outside her own.
To her, then, the life everlasting must mean _her_ life, and he
regretted having used that phrase. She was concerned, then, entirely
with her own existence--(and with his in so far as it overlapped
hers)--and life to her was either "fun" or something unthinkable.
. . . . It seemed to him that he was near understanding her, and he
loved her more than ever, and a rare warmth flooded his thoughts and
they took on a life of their own, were bodied forth, and in a sort of
ecstasy, thrilling and triumphant, he had the illusion of being lifted
out of himself, of soaring and roaming free and with a power
altogether new to him, a power whereof he was both creator and
creature, he saw out of his own circumscribed area of life into
another life that was no replica of this, but yet was of the same
order, smaller, neater, trimmer, concentrated, and distilled. There
was brilliant color in it and light and shade sharply distinct, and
everything in it--houses, trees, mountains, hills, clouds--was rounded
and precise: there was movement in it, but all ordered and purposeful.
The sun shone, and round the corner there was a selection of moons,
full, half, new, and crescent, and both sun and moon could be put away
so that there should be darkness. As for stars, there were as many as
he chose to sprinkle on the sky. . . . At first he could only gaze at
this world in wonder. It sailed before him in a series of the most
dignified evolutions, displaying all its treasures to him; mountains
bowed and clouds curtseyed, and Eastern cities came drifting into
view, and ships and islands; and there were palaces and the gardens of
philosophers, sea beaches whereon maidens sang and mermaids combed
their hair; and there were great staircases up and down which moved
stately personages in silence, so that it was clear there was some
great ceremony toward, but before he could discover the meaning of it
all the world moved on and displayed another aspect of its seemingly
endless variety. And he was sated with it and asked for it to stop,
and at last with a mighty effort he became more its creator than its
creature, and, as though he had just remembered the Open Sesame, it
stayed in its course. It stayed, and in a narrow, dark street, with
one flickering light in it, and the brilliant light of a great
boulevard at the end of it, he saw an old white-bearded man with a
pack on his back and a staff in his hand. And the old man knew that he
was there, and he beckoned to him to come into the street. So he went
and followed him, and without a word they turned through a little dark
gateway and across up a courtyard and up into a garret, and the old
man gave him a sack to sit on and lifted his packet from his back and
out of it built up a little open box, and hung a curtain before it.
Old Mole settled on his sack and opened his lips to speak to the old
man, but he had disappeared.
The curtain rose.
III
INTERLUDE
_I may have lost my judgment and my wits, but I must confess I liked
that play. There was something in it._
THE SEAGULL
III
INTERLUDE
_Go now, go into the land
Where the mind is free and the heart
Blooms, and the fairy band
Airily troops to the dusty mart;
And the chatter and money-changing
Die away. In fancy ranging,
Let all the inmost honey of the world
Sweeten thy faith, to see unfurl'd
Love's glory shown in every little part
Of life; and, seeing, understand._
BY a roadside, at the end of a village, beneath the effigy of a god,
sat a lean, brown old man. He had no covering for his head and the
skin of the soles of his feet was thickened and scarred. In front of
him were two little boxes, and on his knees there lay open a great
book from which he was reading aloud in an unknown tongue.
From the village there came a young man, richly clad and gay, attended
by two slaves. He saluted the effigy of the god and asked the old man
what he might be reading. The old man replied that it was the oldest
book in the world and the truest, and when he was questioned about the
boxes he said that one of them contained riches and the other power.
The young man looked into them and saw nothing. He laughed and spoke
to one of his slaves, saying the old and the poor must have their
fancies since there was nothing else for them, and, upon his orders,
the slave filled the boxes with rice, and at once there sprung up two
mighty trees. The slaves fled howling and the young man abased himself
before the effigy of the god and stole away on his knees, praying. The
old man raised his hands in thanksgiving for the shade of the trees,
lifted them out of the boxes, and once more arranged them before him.
In the wood hard by arose the sound of high words and out upon the
road, brawling and storming, tumbled two youths, comely and tall and
strong. They stopped before the old man and appealed to him.
"Our father," said he who first found breath, "is a poor man of this
village, and I am Peter and my brother is Simon. Two days ago, on a
journey, we saw the picture of the loveliest maiden in the world. We
do not know her name, but we are both determined to marry her, and
there is no other desire left in us. We have fought and wrestled and
swum for her, but can reach no conclusion. I will not yield and he
will not yield. Is all our life to be spent in wrangling?"