boisterously. Through the long hours in the crawling train, with the
dawn creeping gray, opal, ripe strawberry, over moors and craggy
hills, he had contrived the scene, played a game of Consequences with
himself, what he said to her and what she said to him, but Matilda
peered at him and in a dull, husky voice said:
"Oh! It's you."
And fatuously he stood there and said:
"Yes."
She was pale and weary and there were deep marks under her eyes. She
said:
"You didn't leave me any money. It was important. We got here last
night and then they told us there'd be no last week's salary. They
didn't pay us on Friday. We traveled on Sunday as usual, and when we
got here they told us. Some one in London's done something.
Enid"--that was the name of the knitting woman--"Enid looked awful
when they told us, quite ill. I went home with her, and I've been up
with her all night. She didn't sleep a wink, but went on counting and
counting out loud, like she used to do to herself in the train. . . .
I've been up with her all night, but it wasn't any good, because in
the morning, when the dawn came, she got up and walked about and went
into the next room, and when I went after her she was dead. And if I'd
only had a little money. . . . She was a good woman and the only
friend I had, and she killed herself."
He sat by her side and took her hand and soothed her.
"But, my dear child, you had plenty of money of your own in the bank,
and your own checkbook."
"I didn't know I was to spend that. It was in the bank. You never told
me what to do with the book."
And to find something to say, to draw her thoughts off the miserable
tragedy, he explained to her the mysteries of banking, how, when you
have more money than you can spend--she had never had it and found
that hard to grasp--you pay it into your account and it is entered
into a book, and how, if it is a great deal more than you can spend,
you lend it to the bank and they pay you interest for it and lend it
to other people. She began to grasp it at last and to see that the
money was really hers and she would be putting no injury nor affront
upon the bank by asking for some of it by means of a check. Then she
said:
"Have we a lot of money in the bank?"
"Not an enormous quantity, but enough to go on without selling out."
"What does that mean?"
He tried to explain the meaning of investments, of stocks and shares,
but that was beyond her capacity and her immediate interest. She had
begun to think practically of her money, and she said:
"Some of these people have nothing at all."
And she made him show her how to write a check, and they hunted up all
the poorer members of the company--those who had any money were
already gone in search of work--and she gave them all enough to pay
their rent and for their journey to their homes. Then she wrote to
Enid's husband and gave him all sorts of messages that had not been
entrusted to her, said that thirty-five shillings had been found in
Enid's purse and sent that amount to him.
They stayed for the inquest, and Enid's husband came. He said what a
good wife she had been to him, and what cruel times they had been
through together, and how he couldn't believe it, and it wasn't like
her to do such a thing, and she would have been another Florence St.
John if she hadn't married him, and he hadn't got the name of a Jonah.
"S'elp me God!" he said, "she was the right stuff on and off the
stage, and them as hasn't had cruel times and been a Jonah won't ever
understand what she's been to me." Through his incoherence there shone
a beauty of dumb, humble and trusting love that now triumphed over
death as it had triumphed over the monotonous, degrading slips and
deprivations of life. Before it Old Mole bowed his head and felt a
sort of envy, a regret that he, too, had not had cruel times and been
a Jonah.
Clumsily he tried to tell Matilda how he felt, but she could hardly
bear to talk of Enid and closed every reference to her with:
"If I had known I could have saved her. I ought to have known."
Even worse was it when he gave her the necklace.
From the scene of the disaster they had moved to a little fishing
village on the Yorkshire coast where they lodged in the cottage of a
widow named Storm, perched halfway up a cliff, and from the windows
they could see right over the North Sea, smooth as glass, with the
herring fleet dotted like flies on its gleaming surface. Here, he
thought, they could overcome their difficulties and relax the tension
brought about by that last dark experience. There would be health in
the wide sea and the huge cliffs and the moorland air. But it was the
first time Matilda had been out of the crowd, and the peace and the
emptiness induced brooding in her.
When he gave her the necklace she took it out of its white satin and
velvet case and fingered it and let the light play on it. Then it
seemed to frighten her, and she asked how much it had cost. He told
her.
"It seems a sin," said she, and put it back in its case.
That night she received his letter and then only she seemed to
understand why he had given her the necklace, and she came and patted
his shoulder and kissed the top of his head. She began to talk of
Enid, how she never complained and never said an unkind word of
anybody, and how proud she was of two little trinkets, a brooch and a
bangle, given her by her husband, which she said she had never pawned
and never would.
"The world seems upside down," said Matilda.
"No. No," he protested. "It is all as it should be, as it must be. My
dear child, I can't tell you how sorry I am. I hurt you, made things
hard for you. I was seeing the world all wrong. Men and women seemed
only toys. . . ."
"But Enid used to say, you can't expect anything from people when they
have to think of money all day long."
"When did she say that?"
"When her husband was out so long and didn't write to her."
"Did she love him very much?"
"Yes."
"And I love you."
"Yes. But. . . . It's so different."
He looked at her and she met his gaze. In her eyes there was a
strength, a determination, a depth that were new to her. It stimulated
him, braced him, and he felt that something was awakened in her,
something that demanded of him, demanded, insisted. He was ashamed of
his letter, ashamed that he had given her the necklace, ashamed that
when she demanded of him the glory of life he had thought no higher
than to give her pleasure.
So he was flung back into torment, and where before he saw humanity
and its infinite variety as smaller than himself, now, with full swing
to the opposite pole of exaggeration, he saw it as immeasurably larger
and superior, full of a mighty purpose, ebbing and flowing like the
sea, while, perched above the fringe of it, he cowered.
He concealed his distress from her. He was not so far gone but he
could delight in the scents and sounds of the country, and he would
tramp away over the moors or along the cliffs by himself, lie in the
heather and smoke and watch the clouds, real, full-bellied clouds,
lumbering and far off shedding a gray gauze of rain. He would fill his
lungs with the keen air and return home hungry to sup on plain cottage
fare or delicious herrings fresh from the sea.
One night, to please him, Matilda wore the necklace. It was
pathetically out of place on her cheap little blouse, incongruous in
their surroundings, the stiff, crowded fisherman's parlor.
It was that decided him. There must be an end of drifting. Sink or
swim, they must endeavor to take their place in the world. They would
go to London. If among the third-rate mummers who had been their
company for so long Matilda could so wonderfully grow and expand, what
might she not, would she not, do among gentler, riper souls? And, for
himself, he would seek out a task. There must be in England men of
active minds and keen imaginations, men among whom he could find, if
not the answers to, at least an interest in, the questions that came
leaping in upon him. They would go to London and make a home, and
Matilda should be the mistress of it. She should live her own life,
and he his, and there would be an end of the strain between them, and
the beginnings of the most fruitful comradeship.
Once again the immediate execution of his plans was frustrated. A
strike was declared on the railways of Great Britain, and it became
impossible for them to move, for they were on a branch line. Letters
and newspapers were brought nine miles by road and there was no lack
of food. The newspapers for a week devoted four columns to the story
of the strike, then three columns, then two, then one. A little war
broke out in the Persian Gulf. That dominated the strike, which lasted
three weeks, and ended in the intervention of the Government, with
neither the companies nor the men yielding.
The village had its Socialists, the postman and the fish buyer, and,
in the beginning of it, they talked excitedly of a general strike; the
dockers would come out and the carters; every port would be closed,
transport at a standstill; the miners would lay down their tools, and
such frightful losses would be inflicted on the capitalists that they
would be unable to pursue their undertakings. They would be taken out
of their hands and worked by the laborers for the laborers, and then
there would be the beginnings of justice upon the earth and the
laborers would begin to enjoy the good things of the world. Old Mole
asked them what they meant by the good things of the world, and the
answer was strangely Hebraic--a land flowing with milk and honey,
where men labored for six days (eight hours a day) and rested the
seventh day, and had time to talk and think. They set an enormous
value on talking and thinking, and all their enthusiasm was for
"settling questions." The land would be "settled," and education, and
housing, and insurance, and consumption, and lead poisoning. Each
"question" was separated from every other; each existed apart from
everything else, and each had its nostrum, the prescription for which
was deferred until the destruction of the capitalists, and the
liberation of the middle classes from their own middle classishness--
(for these Socialists detested the middle classes even more than the
capitalists)--had placed the ingredients in their hands. The
"questions" had to be settled; the capitalists had created them, the
middle classes, like sheep, accepted them; the "questions" had to be
settled once for all, and therefore the capitalists had to be ruined
and the middle classes squeezed in their pockets and stomachs until
they surrendered and accepted the new ordering of the world in
justice, brotherhood, and equality. Already the strike was doing
damage at the rate of hundreds and thousands a week, and they had
caught the bulk of the middle classes in their holidays, and thousands
of them would be unable to get back to their work.
In the thick of it Old Mole, to satisfy himself, walked over to that
town which is advertised as the Queen of Watering Places. There were
thousands of the middle classes on the sands. Their children were
sprawling on sand castles and dabbling in the thin washings of the
sea. Fathers and mothers were lounging in deck chairs, sleeping under
handkerchiefs and hats and umbrellas; grandmothers were squatting in
charge of their grandchildren. Some of them were reading about the
strike in the newspapers. At teatime the beach was cleared as though
all human beings had been blown from it by a sea breeze. An hour later
it was thickly thronged and the pierrots in their little open-air
theater were playing to an enormous audience. The strike had prolonged
their holiday; they were prepared to go on in its monotony instead of
in the monotony of their work and domestic life. They were quite
contented, dully acceptant. There were no trains? Very well, then;
they would wait until there were trains. Respectable, well-behaved,
orderly, genteel people do not starve. . . . And they were right.
However, it set Old Mole thinking about his own means, the
independence which he owed to no virtue nor talent, nor thrift of his
own, but to a system which he did not understand, to sources which in
the intricacies of their journey to himself were impossible to follow.
Of the many enterprises all over the world, in the profits of which he
had his share, he knew nothing at all. The reports that were sent to
him were too boring or too technical to read. The postman and the fish
buyer assured him that he was living upon the underpaid and overtaxed
labors of thousands of unhappy men and women. He had no reason for
disbelieving them, but, on the whole, his sympathies were with the
middle-classes, his attitude theirs; that respectable, well-behaved,
orderly, genteel people do not starve. Not that he classed himself
with them; he disliked the memory of his colleagues at Thrigsby, of
the men at the golf club at Bigley more than anything, and at this
time he was not moderate in his dislikes. He warmed to the enthusiasm
of the Socialists, but was exasperated by the manner in which, after
having made a clean sweep of everything except themselves and their
kind, they could produce no constructive idea, but only a thin
cerebral fluid, done up in different colored bottles as in a pharmacy.
Just at the point when he found himself beginning to dream of a world
of decent, kindly, human beings delivered (as far as possible) from
their own folly and the tyrannies bred from it, they left humanity
altogether and gloated hectically over their "questions."
If that were Socialism, he would have none of it; he preferred money.
He told them so, and found that he had uttered the most appalling
blasphemy. They said that Socialism was a religion, the religion that
would save the world.
Said Old Mole:
"There have been Hebraism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Christianity, the
worship of Isis and Osiris, the worship of the Bull, the Cat, the
Snake, the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the Phallus; there have been
prophets without number and martyrs more than I can say, saints for
every day in the year and more, and none of them has saved the world.
More than that, I will go so far as to say that none of them has done
as much to raise the standard of living as money."
"Damn it all," said the fish buyer, "I'm not talking about
superstitions. I'm talking about ideas."
"Money also is an idea," replied Old Mole, "and it is as generally
misunderstood as any other."
He was beginning to be rather excited, for he felt that he was getting
the better of the argument, and would not allow himself to see that he
had floundered on to the debater's trick of shunting his opponents on
to unfamiliar country. They had gone up and down one stretch of line,
between two points--capitalism and labor--for so long, without looking
on either side of them, that it needed only a very slight adjustment
or transposition of terms to reduce them to a beating of the void.
They clung to their point, and the postman at last said triumphantly:
"But money isn't a religion; Socialism is--the religion, the only
religion of the working classes of this country. They've had enough of
the next world; they want a bit o' this for a change."
"So do I," returned Old Mole, "all of it. I say that money is an idea,
perhaps the only practicable idea in the world at present. It isn't a
religious idea simply because men as a whole are not religious. It has
the advantage over your Socialism that it is a part of life as it is,
while your religion, as you call it, is only a straining after the
future life, an edifice without a foundation, for to bring about its
realization you have to hew and cut and shape human nature to fit into
the conditions of your fantasy. If I wanted to be a prophet, which I
don't--I should base my vision on money. There would be some chance
then of everybody understanding it and really taking it into his life.
If you could make money a religious idea--that is, make money a thing
which men would respect and revere and abuse as little as
possible--you would very likely produce something--deeds, not words
and questions."
"Don't you call the strike 'doing something'?" cried the fish buyer.
"We shall see," replied Old Mole.
The postman filled his cutty and laughed:
"Don't you see," he said to the fish buyer, "that he is pulling your
leg?"
So, convinced of their superiority, they abandoned the discussion.
His tussles with these Jeremiahs of the Yorkshire village gave Old
Mole the confidence he needed, and the exultant glow of a sharpening
of the wits, which are like razors, most apt to cut the wielder of
them when they are most dull. He tortured himself no more with his
failure to satisfy Matilda, but laid all his hopes in the future and
the amusing life in London that he wished to create for her. Intensely
he desired her to develop her own life, to grow into the splendid
creature he now saw struggling beneath the crust of ignorance and
prejudice and shyness and immaturity that hemmed her in. There was
such beauty in her, and he had failed to make it his, a part of
himself, and in his blundering efforts to teach her, to lead her on to
the realization and gift of herself, he had wounded her even when he
most adored her. . . . The dead woman, Enid, had been more to her than
he had ever been. He saw that now. She had known in that woman's lift
something that was not in her own, and she desired it; how much it was
painful to see. She never looked for it in him, but gazed in upon
herself in a sort of pregnancy of the soul. And, like a pregnant
woman, she must be satisfied in her whimsies, she must have her
desires anticipated, she must be given the color and brightness of
life, now before her sensitiveness had passed away for want of fair
impressions. These she had been denied in the young years of her life.
She must have them. . . . She must have them. . . .
She accepted his proposal to go to London without enthusiasm. She
thought over it for some time and at last she said:
"Yes. It will be best for you. I don't want you to go away again."
And the night before they left, when the train-service was restored,
she took out the necklace as she was undressing and tried it on, and
looked at herself in the mirror and said:
"I'd like to wear this in London. But I shall want an evening dress,
sha'n't I?"
She smiled at him. His heart overflowed and colored the workings of
his mind with a full humor. He thought:
"If there be ideas, how better can they be expressed than in terms of
Matilda?"
V
IN THE SWIM
_Whoever has an ambition to be heard in a crowd must press, and
squeeze, and thrust, and climb, with indefatigable pains, till he has
exalted himself to a certain degree of altitude above them._
A TALE OF A TUB
V
IN THE SWIM
THEY stayed at first in one of the hotels designed to give provincials
bed and breakfast for five shillings, for visitors to London do not
mind in how much they are mulcted in pursuit of pleasure, but resent
the payment of an extra farthing for necessaries. They were high up on
the fifth floor and could see right over many roofs and chimneys to
the dome of St. Paul's. They saw the sights and lunched and dined in
restaurants, and went by river to Greenwich, by tram to Kew, and Old
Mole was forced to admit that it is possible to fall short of a
philosophic conception of happiness and yet to have a very amusing
time. It was Matilda's ambition to go to every theater in London. She
found it possible to enjoy everything, and therefore he was not bored.
Sheer physical exhaustion brought their pleasure-seeking to an end,
and they set about finding a habitation. On their arrival Old Mole had
written to his brother, but had had no reply. At last a scrubby clerk
arrived with a note:
"So glad you have come to your senses. Come to lunch, 1.15.--R. B."
They went to lunch in Gray's Inn, and after so much frequenting of
public places it was deliciously peaceful to sink into private
armchairs among personal belongings and a goodly company of books.
Robert was very genial and kissed Matilda and delivered her over to
his laundress for the inevitable feminine preparations for a meal.
While she was away he told Old Mole that he had taken silk, and was
retiring from the Bar, and building himself a house at Sunningdale,
for the links, and was looking out for a suitable tenant. If Old Mole
liked to keep a room for him he could have the place practically as it
stood, on a two-thirds sharing basis. . . . It were hard to find, in
London, a pleasanter place. The windows looked out onto the rookery,
the rooms were of beautiful design and proportion, and there were
eight of them altogether distributed over two floors, communicating by
a charming oak-balustraded staircase.
"I've lived here for thirty years," said Robert, "and I'd like it kept
in the family."
Old Mole was delighted. It saved all the vexation and discomfort of
finding and furnishing a house, and here, ready-made, was the
atmosphere of culture and comfort he was seeking and inwardly
designing for the blossoming of Matilda.
Robert beamed on her when she came in, and said:
"We've made a plan."
She was properly excited.
"Yes. You're going to live here."
"Here? . . . Oh!" And she looked about among the pictures and the old
furniture and the rich curtains and hangings, and timidly, shyly, as
though she were not certain how they would take it, adopted them.
They made her sit at the head of the table and placed themselves on
either side of her, and, as Robert poured her out a glass of wine
(Berncastler Doktor), he said:
"You know, the old place has always wanted this."
"Wanted--what?" asked Matilda. "I think it's perfect."
"A charming hostess," said Robert, with an elaborate little bow of
courtliness.
A fortnight later saw Robert installed at Sunningdale and the Beenhams
in occupation of his chambers. They shared only the dining-room; Old
Mole had the upstairs rooms and Matilda those downstairs. It was his
arrangement, and came from reaction against the closeness in which
they had lived during the long pilgrimage from lodging to lodging.
Once a fortnight Robert engaged Old Mole to play golf with him, and he
consented because he desired to give Matilda as full a liberty as she
could desire. In the alternate weeks Robert came to stay for two
nights and occupied his room next to Old Mole's. He would take them
out to dinner and the theater, and after it the brothers would sit up
yarning until the small hours, and always the discussion would begin
by Robert saying:
" 'Pon my honor, women are extraordinary!" And then, completely to his
own satisfaction, he would produce those generalizations which, in
England, pass for a knowledge of human nature, and Old Mole would
recognize them as old companions of his own. They were too absurd for
anger, but Robert's persistence would annoy him, and he would say:
"When you live with a woman you are continually astonished to find
that she is a human being."
"Human," answered Robert, sweetening the sentiment with a sip of port,
"with something of the angel."
"Angel be damned," came in explosive protest, "women are just as human
as ourselves, and rather more so."
"Ah!" said Robert, with blissful inconsequence, "but it doesn't do to
let 'em know it."