for the control of the mines and the factories and all the sources of
wealth, and land and water were made all men's and no man's property,
and the children were trained to believe in the revealed religion of
love as the living word of God in the heart of man, then the Princess
announced her marriage with her Minister and adviser, Peter, the son
of a poor man, and they lived happily with their people, and all men
loved and praised Peter, and Peter praised and worshiped the Princess
Elizabeth. They lived to a ripe old age, gathering blessings as they
went, and they had sixteen children.
But Simon returned to his own country and his village, taking with him
the two boxes. Out of the one he never took another piece of gold, and
into the other he never looked until he was at peace with himself and
knew that he could gaze upon his soul undismayed. When he looked into
it he saw Peter and the Princess and their children, for all his love
was with them. Then he went out upon the road, and beneath an enormous
oak tree he found the lean, brown old man with his great book on his
knees, reading aloud. He laid the boxes at his feet and bowed to him
and said:
"It is well."
The old man bowed, and, turning a page in his book, he read:
"It is well with the world. Man frets his peace in his little hour on
this earth, whereof he is and whereto he returns; but it is well with
the world."
The curtain fell. The little theater disappeared, and all that he had
seen and heard in it buzzed in Old Mole's head, and the colors whirled
and a flood of emotion surged through his body, and the spell of it
all was upon him. He shifted uneasily upon the sack on which he was
seated, and there came a rent in it. Inside it was a corpse, and, when
he peered at it in horror, he knew that it was himself.
The enchantment broke, and, shivering and very cold, he fell back into
the world of familiar things, the room in the lodging house, with the
fire out, and above his head, in the first floor front, lay Matilda,
sleeping. He went up to her, and she lay with her hair back over her
pillow and her hand under her cheek, and he said:
"I will live to serve you. For my life is nothing except it go to
sustain the wonder of yours."
Old Mole was much astonished at this effort of his imagination, and
later on wrote and rewrote it many times, but what he wrote was no
more than the pale echo of what he had heard, the faded copy of what
he had seen. When he came to analyze and diagnose his condition he
concluded that the vivid impressions produced on his unexercised
receptive mind had induced a kind of self-hypnotism in which he had
been delivered up to the power of dreams subject peculiarly to the
direction of his logical faculty. He could not remember having eaten
anything that would account for it.
IV
TOYS
_Worte! Worte! Keine Thaten!
Niemals Fleisch, geliebte Puppe,
Immer Geist und keinen Braten,
Keine Knödel in der Suppe._
ROMANCERO
IV
TOYS
WHEN the pantomime came to an end (as it did before a packed house,
that cheered and cheered again and insisted on speeches from the
comedians and the principal boy and the principal girl, and went on
cheering regardless of last trains and trams and closing time) Matilda
was told that, if she liked and if she had nothing better to do, she
could return again next year. She declared her pleasure at the
prospect, but inwardly determined to have something a great deal
better to do. She had drawn blood from the public and was thirsting
for more of it. Her condition was one with which Old Mole was destined
to become familiar, but now he was distressed by her excitement,
insisted that she was tired (she looked it), and decided on a holiday.
She would only consent on condition that he allowed her to take
singing lessons and would pay for them. Still harping on economy--for
she could not get the extent and fertility of his means into her
head--she pitched on Blackpool because she had a sort of cousin there
who kept lodgings and would board them cheap. He tried to argue with
her, and suggested London or Paris. But London had become to her the
heaven to which all good "professionals" go, and Paris was very little
this side of Hell for wickedness, and her three months in the theater
had had the curious result of making her set great store by her estate
as a married woman. To Blackpool they went and were withered by the
March winds and half starved by Matilda's cousin, who despised them
when she learned that they were play actors. They were miserable, and
for misery no worse setting could be found than an empty pleasure
city. They frequented the theater, and very quickly Matilda made
friends with its permanent officials and arranged for her singing
lessons with the conductor of the orchestra, who was also organist of
a church and eked out a meager living with instruction on the violin,
'cello, piano, organ, flute, trombone, tympani, voice production and
singing--(all this was set forth on his card, which he left on Old
Mole by way of assuring himself that all was as it should be and he
would be paid for his trouble). Matilda had four lessons a week, and
she practiced most industriously. "It was not," said her instructor,
"as though she were training for op'ra, but just to get the voice
clear and refine it. . . ." He was very genteel, was Mr. Edwin Watts,
and he did more for her pronunciation in a week than Old Mole had been
able to accomplish in a year and more. His gentility discovered the
gentleman in his pupil's husband, and he invited them to his house,
and gave them tickets for concerts and the Tower and a series of organ
recitals he was giving in his church. He was a real musician, but he
was alone in his music, for he had an invalid wife who looked down on
his profession and would admit none of his friends to the house, which
she filled with suites of furniture, china knickknacks, lace curtains
and pink ribbons. The little man lived in perpetual distrust of
himself, admired his wife because he loved her, and submitted to her
taste, regarding his own as a sort of unregenerate longing. Neither
Old Mole nor Matilda were musical, but, when his wife was out to tea
with the wife of the bank manager or the chemist, Watts would invite
them to his parlor and play the piano--Bach, Beethoven, Chopin--until
they could take in no more and his music was just a noise to them. But
there was no exhausting his capacity or his energy, and when they were
thoroughly worn out he used to play "little things of his own." He was
very religious and full of cranks, a great reader of the
advertisements in the newspapers, and there was no patent medicine,
hair restorer, magnetic belt, uric acid antidote that he had not
tried. He was proud of it, and used to say:
"I've tried 'em all except the bust preservers."
It was precisely here that he and Old Mole found common ground. With
his new mental activity Old Mole had become increasingly sensitive to
any sluggishness in his internal organs and began to resent his
tendency to fleshiness. He and Mr. Watts had immense discussions, and
the musician produced remedies for every ailment and symptom.
Matilda said they were disgusting, but Old Mole stuck to it, smoked
less, ate less, took long walks in the morning, and attained a
ruddiness of complexion, a geniality of manner, a sense of wellbeing
that helped him, with surprising suddenness, to begin to enjoy his
life, to delight in its little pleasures, and to laugh at its small
mischances and irritations. With a chuckling glee he would watch
Matilda in her goings out and her comings in, and he preferred even
her assiduous practicing to her absence. He was amazed at the
swiftness with which, on the backward movement of time, his past life
was borne away from him, with his anxieties, his unrest, his
bewilderment, his repugnance in the face of new things and new people.
He found that he was no longer shy with other men, nor did he force
them to shyness. He lost much of his desire to criticize and came by a
warm tolerance, which saved him from being conscious of too many
things at once and left him free to exist or to live, as the case
might be. He felt ready for anything.
When, therefore, Matilda announced that Mr. Watts had procured her an
engagement with a No. 2 Northern Musical Comedy Company, touring, "The
Cinema Girl" and "The Gay Princess," he packed up his traps, told
himself that he would see more of this astonishing England, and went
with her. She had two small parts and was successful in them. And now,
when she was in the theater, he no longer skulked in their lodgings
nor divided her existence into two portions--his and the theater's,
but went among the company, joined in their fare and jokes and
calamities, played golf with the principal comedian and the manager,
and saw things with their eyes. This was easy, because they saw very
little. They liked and respected him, and soon discovered that he had
money. Matilda's lot was made comfortable and her parts were enlarged.
Neither she nor her husband attributed this to anything but her
talent, and it made them very happy. Her name was on the program, and
they cut out all the flattering references to her in the newspapers
and pasted them into a book, and it were hard to tell which read them
the oftener, he or she. He felt ready for everything, expanded like a
well-tended plant; but with his unrest had gone much of his sympathy
and the tug and tear of his heart on the sight of misery. He watched
men now as they might be dolls, pranked up and tottering, flopping
through their daily employments, staggeringly gesticulating through
anger and love, herding together for pleasure and gain, and when both
were won (or avoided), lurching into their own separate little houses.
In this mood it pleased him to be with the dolls of the theater,
because they were gayer than the rest, farded, painted, peacocking
through their days. He caught something of their swagger, and, looking
at the world through their eyes, saw it as separate from himself, full
of dull puppets, bound to one place, caught in a mesh of streets,
while from week to week he moved on. The sense of liberty, of having
two legs where other men were shackled, was potent enough to carry him
through the traveling on Sundays, often all day long, with dreary
waits at empty, shuttered stations, and blinded him to the small
miseries, the mean scandals, the jealousies, rivalries and wounded
sensibilities which occupied the rest of the company. . . . There was
one woman--she was perhaps forty-five--who sat opposite to him on
three consecutive Sundays. She played, in both pieces, the inevitable
dowager to chaperone the heroine; she was always knitting, and, with
brows furrowed, she stared fixedly in front of her; her lips were
always moving, and every now and then she would nod her head
vigorously, or she would stop and stare desperately, and put her hands
to her lips and her heart would leap to her mouth. At first Old Mole
thought she was counting the stitches; but once, in the train, she
laid aside her knitting and produced a roll of cloth and cut out a
pair of trousers. Her lips went more furiously than ever, and suddenly
her eyes stared and she held out her hand with the scissors as though
to ward off some danger. Old Mole leaned across and spoke to her, but
she was so taken up with her own thoughts that she replied:
"Yes, it's better weather, isn't it?" jerked out a watery smile and
withdrew into herself. When Old Mole asked Matilda why the woman
counted her stitches even when she was not knitting, and why,
apparently, she dropped so many stitches when she was, Matilda told
him that the woman had lost her voice and her figure and could make
very little money, and had a husband who was a comedian, the funniest
fellow in the world off the stage, but when he was "on" all his humor
leaked away, and though he worked very hard no one laughed at him, and
he, too, made very little money. They had six children, and all the
time in the train the woman was making calculations. She often
borrowed money, but that only added to her perplexity, because she
could not bear not to pay it back.
This story almost moved Old Mole, but his mood was too strong for him,
and the woman only came forward to the foreground of the puppet show,
a sort of link between the free players, the colored, brilliant dolls,
and the drab mannikins who lived imprisoned in the background.
His was a very pleasant mood to drift in and lounge and taste the
soothing savor of irony, which dulls sharp edges and tempers the
emphasis of optimism or pessimism. It seems to deliver the soul from
its desire for relief and sops its hunger with a comfortable pity. But
it is a lie. Old Mole knew it not for what it was and hugged it to
himself, and called it wisdom, and he began to write a satire on
education as he had known it in Thrigsby. He reveled in the physical
labor of writing, in the company of his ideas as they took shape in
the furnace of concentration, and what he had intended to be a short
pamphlet grew into an elaborate account of his twenty-five years of
respectable and respected service, showing the slow submergence of the
human being into the machine evolved for the creation of other
machines. . . . He was weeks and months over it. The tour did not come
to an end as had been anticipated, but was continued through the
holiday months at the seaside resorts. They returned to Blackpool in
August, and then he finished his work and read it to Edwin Watts. The
musician had an enormous reverence for the printed word, and had never
met an author before. His emotionalism warmed up and colored the
dryness and bitterness of Old Mole's tale, and he saw in it only a
picture of suppression and starved imagination like his own. He
applauded, and Old Mole was proud of his firstborn and determined to
publish it. In his early days he had revised and prepared a book of
Examination Papers in Latin accidence for a series, and to the
publisher he sent his "Syntax and Sympathy." It had really moved Edwin
Watts, and he composed in its honor a sonata in B flat, which he
dedicated "To the mute, inglorious Miltons of Lancashire." It was
played on the pier by a municipal band, but did not immediately
produce any ebullition of genius.
When Old Mole told Matilda that he had written a book she asked:
"Is it a story?"
"A sort of story."
"Has it a happy ending? I can't see why people write stories that make
you miserable."
"It's a wonderful book," said Edwin Watts.
And Old Mole said:
"I flatter myself there are worse books written."
When Watts had gone Matilda said:
"If it's not a nice book I couldn't bear it."
"What do you mean--you couldn't bear it?"
"If it's like that Lucretius you're so fond of I'd be ashamed."
In the intoxication that still endured from the fumes of writing he
had been thinking that the book was not incomparable with "De Rerum
Natura," something between that and the Satires of Juvenal.
In a few weeks his manuscript returned with a polite letter from the
publisher declining it, desiring to see more of Mr. Beenham's work,
and enclosing his reader's report. It was short:
" 'Syntax and Sympathy' is satire without passion or any basis of love
for humanity. There is nothing more damnable. The book is clever
enough. It would be beastly in French--there is a plentiful crop of
them in Paris; in England, thank God, with our public's loathing of
cleverness, it is impossible."
The author burned letter and report, and at night, when Matilda was at
the theater, buried the manuscript in the sands.
If there be any man who, awaking from a moral crisis, finds himself
withered by the fever of it and racked with doubt as to his power to
go boldly and warmly among his fellowmen without being battered and
bewildered into pride or priggishness or cold egoism or thin-blooded
humanitarianism, let him go to Blackpool in holiday time. There he
will find hundreds of thousands of men, women and children; he will
hear them, see them, smell them, be jostled and chaffed by them. He
will find them in and on the water, on the sands, in the streets, in
the many public places, shows and booths, in the vast ballrooms,
straggling and stravading, smoking, drinking, laughing, guffawing,
cracking coarse jokes, singing bawdy and patriotic songs with equal
gusto, making music with mouth-organs, concertinas, cornets; young men
and maidens kissing and squeezing unashamed, and at night stealing out
to the lonely sands; old men and women gurgling over beer and tobacco,
yarning over the troubles that came of just such lovemaking in their
young days; and all hot and perspiring; wearing out their bodies, for
once in a way, in pleasure, gross pleasure with no savor to it nor
lasting quality, but coarse as the food they eat, as the beds they lie
on, as the clothes they wear; forgetting that their bodies are, day
in, day out, bent in labor, forgetting the pinch and penury of their
lives at home, forgetting that their bodies have any other than their
brutish functions of eating, drinking, sleeping, excretion and
fornication. . . . Old Mole watched it all, and, true to his ironical
mood, he saw the mass in little, swarming like ants; in the early
morning of the great day these creatures were belched forth from the
black internal regions of the country, out upon the seashore; there
they sprawled and struggled and made a great clatter and din, until at
the end of the day they were sucked back again. Intellectually it
interested him. It was a pageant of energy unharnessed; but it was all
loose, unshaped, overdone, repeating itself again and again, so that
at last it destroyed any feeling he might have had for it. He saw it
through to the end, to the last excursion train going off, crammed in
every compartment, with tired voices singing, often quite beautifully,
in harmony.
Matilda had refused to go out with him. She came home very late from
the theater, and said she had been helping the knitting woman cut out
some clothes. He asked her if she had ever seen the crowds in the
pleasure city. She looked away from him, and with a sudden, almost
imperceptible, gesture of pain replied:
"Once."
He knew when that was, and with a tearing agony the old jealousy
rushed in upon him and with a brutality that horrified him, that was
whipped out of him, to the ruin of his self-control, he ground out:
"Yes. I know when that was."
Her hand went tugging up to her breast and she said with passionate
resentment:
"You ought never to say a thing like that to me."
His blood boiled into a fury and he turned on her, but she was gone.
He wrestled with himself, toiled and labored to regain his will, the
mastery of his thoughts and his feelings. The jealousy died away, but
no other emotion came to take its place. He regained his will, saw
clearly again, but was more possessed by his irony than before. He was
no longer its master, no longer drifting comfortably, but its slave,
whirled hither and thither at its caprice--and it was like a hot gusty
wind blowing in him before a storm. All the color of the world was
heavy and metallic, but it was painted color, a painted world. He was
detached from himself, from Matilda, and he and she passed into the
puppet show in the miserable liberty of the gaily painted dolls: free
only in being out of the crowd, sharing none of the crowd's energy,
having no part in any solidarity.
He made himself a bed on the hard horsehair sofa in their room and lay
hour by hour staring at the window panes, listening to the distant
thud and thunder of the sea, watching for the light to come to make
plain the window and show up the colors of the painted world.
In the morning they avoided each other, and she spent the day with the
knitting woman, he with Edwin Watts, and, when, at night, she returned
from the theater, he was asleep. It was the first time they had
strangled a day, and it lay cold and dark between them. He admitted
perfectly that he was at fault, but to say that he was sorry was a
mockery and an untruth. He was not sorry, for he felt nothing.
They bore the burden of their sullen acquiescence in silence into the
third day, and then she said:
"If you want me to go, I'll go."
"No! No! I'll go."
Silence had been torture, but speech was racking. They were at the
mercy of words, and there was an awful finality about the word _go_
which neither desired and yet neither could qualify. . . . Plainly she
had been weeping, but that exasperated him. She, at any rate, had
found an outlet, and he had discovered none. And all the time he was
haunted by the futility, the childishness of it all.
"Where will you go?" she asked.
"Does it matter?"
"I suppose not. But some one must look after you."
He muttered unintelligibly.
Was he--was he coming back? Of course he was. He would let her know.
He went to Paris and stayed in his old hotel in the Rue Daunou. The
exhilaration of the journey, the spirit of amusement that is in the
air of the city of light, buoyed him up for a couple of days. He dined
skillfully and procured the glow of satisfaction of a bottle of fine
wine, sought crowds and the curious company of the boulevards, but as
soon as he was alone again his inflation collapsed and he took pen,
paper and thick paintlike ink and wrote his first letter to her. He
began "my love," crossed that out and substituted "my dearest," tore
up the sheet of paper and began "my dear." He pondered this for a long
time and wrote his initials and circles and squares on the paper, as
it dawned on him that for the first time for nearly thirty years--well
over twenty, at any rate--he was writing a love letter, that it had to
be written, and that the last series upon which he had embarked was no
sort of model for this. He chewed the ends and ragged threads of folly
of his twenties and was astonished at the small amount of truth and
genuine affection he could find in them, wondered, too, what had
become of the waters of the once so easily tapped spring of ardor and
affection. It seemed to him that he could mark the very moment of its
subterranean plunge. It had been, had it not, when he had made his
fruitless effort to escape from Thrigsby, when he had applied--in
vain--for the Australian professorship. Then he had shut and locked
the door upon himself, and he remembered clearly the day, at the
beginning of term, when he had, with glowing excitement and a sort of
tragical humor, saluted his Form Room as his lasting habitation. . . .
Once more he scratched H. J. B. on the paper before him, but saw it
not, for clearly in his mind was the vision of Matilda, lying in her
bed with her hair thrown back over her pillow and her hand beneath her
cheek, and the whiteness of her throat and the slenderness of her
arms, the scent of her hair. . . . His heart was full again. He took
another sheet of paper, and, with no picking of phrases, he wrote:
"My little one. Are there still the marks of your tears on your
cheeks? There are still the bruises of my own obstinacy upon my barren
old heart. I am here, miles away from you, in another country, but I
am more with you than I have ever been. What a burden I must have been
upon you! It must have been that I must selfishly have felt that. One
would suffer more from being a burden than from bearing a burden. (And
you said: 'Who will look after you?' I think that rasped my blown
vanity more than anything.) One would suffer more, I say, if one were
a withered, parched, tedious old egoist, as I am. Tell me, are there
still the marks of your tears on your cheeks? I cannot bear not to
know. I love you. Now I know that I love you. If this world were
fairyland, you would love me. But this world is this world. And it is
the richer, as I am, by my love for you.
H. J. B."
As feverishly and feather-headedly as a boy he skimmed upon the air to
post this letter, and as he slipped it into the box he kissed the
envelope, and as he did so he was overcome by a sense of the delicious
absurdity of his love, of all love, and he bowed low and gravely to
the Opera House and said:
"You are a pimple on the face of the earth, my friend, but my love is
the blood of its veins."
He packed his bag before he went to bed, was up very early in the
morning, and, as soon as a certain shop in the Rue de la Paix was
opened, went in and bought a necklace of crystals and emeralds. He was
in London by six o'clock and half an hour later in the northern
express. He reached Blackpool before his letter. The company and
Matilda were gone. It was Sunday. The theater was closed and he had
lost his card of the tour. Watts did not know. He never knew anything.
Companies came and went and he stayed, as he said with his weak,
watery smile, "right there," only thankful that their damnable tunes
were gone with them. Old Mole cursed him for an idiot and hunted up
the stage doorkeeper, whose son was callboy and knew everything. He
routed them out of bed, got the information he needed, and was off
again as fast as a cross-country train could carry him.