go on nibbling without his aid, but Old Mole had begun to feel a
chill, and rose to go. Panoukian was also going toward the India
Office--Harbottle was corresponding with the Secretary about two
Parsees who had been refused their right of appeal to the Privy
Council--and so far they went together. As they parted Old Mole
remembered Matilda's dinner party and Miss Dufresne. Panoukian seemed
an excellent buffer. He invited him, and from the eagerness with which
the invitation was accepted he surmised that Panoukian was rather
lonely in London. Then he felt glad that he had asked him.
The party was very successful. Matilda was delighted to have another
male, and that a young one, to admire her fine feathers, and Panoukian
was obviously flattered and deliciously alarmed to meet a real live
actress who confirmed him in his superstitious notions of the morals
of the stage by flirting with him at sight. He was not very skilful in
his response, but a very little subjugation was enough to satisfy Miss
Dufresne: she only needed to know that she could an she would. He was
very shy, and, with him, shyness ran to talkativeness. With Matilda he
was like a schoolboy; his attitude toward her was a softening and
rounding with chivalry of his attitude toward Old Mole. He hardly ever
spoke to her without calling her Mrs. Beenham: "Yes, Mrs.
Beenham"--"Don't you think so, Mrs. Beenham?"--"As I was saying to
your husband, Mrs. Beenham. . . ." When he left he summoned up courage
to ask Old Mole if he would bring Mrs. Beenham to tea with him. He
lived in the Temple and had a wonderful view of St. Paul's and the
river. Old Mole promised he would do so, and asked him to come in
whenever he liked.
"It's awfully good of you," said Panoukian, and with that he went off
with Miss Dufresne, who had engaged him to see her into a taxi.
Matilda stood at the head of the stairs and watched them go down.
"Good night, dearie," called Miss Dufresne, and Panoukian, looking up,
saw Matilda bending over.
"Good night, Mrs. Beenham," he cried.
Matilda, returning to the study, said:
"What a nice voice that boy has got."
"I used to expect great things of Panoukian," said Old Mole, "but then
neither he nor I had seen beyond Oxford."
"Is he very clever?"
"He used to have the sort of cleverness schoolmasters like. It remains
to be seen whether he has the sort of cleverness the world needs. He
is very young."
"Not so _very_ young."
"Like your party?"
"Oh, yes."
"You looked very pretty."
"Thank you, sir."
"Good girl. What about bed?"
But she was loth to move. She began several topics, but soon dropped
them. At last she plunged:
"Millie's going into a new piece. It's a real play this time. It's
about the stage and there are to be a lot of chorus girls in it. She
says she could get me in easily."
Old Mole took this in silence.
"I won't go if you don't like it," she said.
"Have you said you would go?"
"Yes, yes."
"Do you want to?"
"What else is there for me to do?"
Indeed, what was there? He was saddened and angry at the use of the
argument. He had wanted her to feel free, to come and to go, so long
only as she treated him with frankness, and here he had so far failed
that she had made arrangements to return to the theater and then asked
for his _post facto_ consent. What was it that kept her in awe of him?
Not his thoughts of her, nor his feeling for her, so far as he knew
either. . . . He kissed her good night and sat sadly brooding over it
all: but it was too difficult for him, and he was tired and his humor
would not come to his aid. He sought refuge in books, but they yielded
him none, and at last Panoukian's phrase recurred to him:
"Perhaps," he said, "perhaps I am a Harbottler in marriage, nibbling
at love. God help me if I am."
He thought surely he had reached the worst. But Fate is inexhaustibly
ingenious. He was to have his bellyful of Harbottling.
Among his letters on the morning after the party he found one, the
envelope of which bore in print the name of Langley Brown, Literary
and Dramatic Agent, 9 Coventry Street, W. This letter informed him
that Mr. Henry Butcher, of the Pall Mall Theater, proposed to
immediately produce--(the split infinitive is Mr. Langley Brown's)--a
play called "Lossie Loses," by Carlton Timmis, the rights of which Mr.
Brown believe to be in Mr. Beenham's hands. And would Mr. Beenham call
on Mr. Brown, or, if not, write to give his consent, when the contract
would be drawn up and the play produced.
He had almost forgotten Carlton Timmis. The letter had been forwarded
through his banker. He stared at it, turned it over and over, read it
again. It seemed to be an authentic document. He handed it to Matilda.
She said with awe:
"Mr. Butcher!"
And, with unconscious imitation of the humor of the English Bench, Old
Mole asked:
"Who is Mr. Butcher?"
This was shocking ignorance. For twenty years and more Mr. Henry
Butcher's name had been in the newspapers, on the hoardings, and his
portrait, his wife's portrait, his baby's portrait, his dog's
portrait, his horse's portrait had appeared in the magazines, and his
commendation of a certain brand of cigarette had for the last ten
years been used by the makers as an advertisement. For all that, his
name and personality had not penetrated Old Mole's consciousness.
"Did you buy the play?" asked Matilda.
"I lent him fifty pounds, and he left it with me. I had no very clear
idea as to his intention."
"Is it a good play?"
"You shall read it."
He unearthed it with some difficulty and gave it to her. She read it
and wept over it.
"Is it a good play?" he asked.
"I don't know, but it's a lovely part."
He went to see Mr. Brown, a flashy little Cockney who peppered him
with illustrious literary names and talked about everything but the
business in hand. Old Mole asked where Timmis might be, and Mr. Brown
said he had heard from him only once, and that from a place called
Crown Imperial, in British Columbia.
"A good fellow, Timmis, but cracked. Impatient, you know. I never can
make young writers see that they've got to wait until the old birds
drop off the perch before their masterpieces can come home to roost."
"Is 'Lossie Loses' a masterpiece?" asked Old Mole innocently.
"Between ourselves," replied the agent, "I don't think there's much in
it. But Mr. Butcher has been having a lean period lately and wanted
something cheap, and thought he'd try a new author."
He produced the contract. Old Mole read it through in a sort of dream
and signed it. He was shown out with a hearty handshake, and that very
evening he received from Mr. Brown a check for ninety pounds--a
hundred in advance of royalties less 10 per cent. commission. He was
disconcerted. There was some uncanny wizardry in it that, by merely
walking into an office and signing a paper, one could at the end of
the day be the richer by ninety pounds with never a stroke of work
done for it. His first impulse was to give the check to Matilda, but,
on reflection, he decided to give her forty and to keep the fifty for
Timmis if he could be found. He looked up Crown Imperial, British
Columbia, on the map and in the gazetteer, but there was no mention of
it, and, concluding that it must be a new place, he wrote to Timmis
there in the hope of catching him. When he had posted his letter he
remembered that Timmis might have dropped his stage name, and wrote
another letter to Cuthbert Jones. Then he brushed the play from his
mind.
Within a fortnight it was impossible to walk along any of the main
thoroughfares of London without seeing the words "Lossie Loses," with
the name of Mr. Henry Butcher in enormous letters, and the name of
Carlton Timmis in very small print.
For the first night Old Mole received, with Mr. Butcher's compliments,
a ticket for Box B. Panoukian and Robert came to dinner. Matilda wore
her first evening dress and the opera cloak, a red ribbon in her hair,
and graced the front of the box with the three men behind her.
There is a certain manner appropriate to a seat in the front of a
box--a consciousness that is not quite self-consciousness, a certain
setting back of the shoulders, a lifting of the head, a sort of shy
brazenness, an acceptance of being part of the show, and, for all the
pit knows, a duchess. Matilda had caught it to perfection and turned a
dignified profile to the opera glasses directed upon her. Panoukian
pointed out the political personages in the stalls, and, being a great
reader of those glossy photographic papers, which are perhaps the most
typical product of the time, was able to recognize many of the
literary and artistic celebrities of the moment. Actresses glided
fussily to their seats, smiling acknowledgment to the applause of the
groundlings. There was a bobbing up and down, a bowing and a smiling,
a waving of programs and fans from acquaintance to acquaintance, a
chatter and hum of many voices that drowned the jigging overture, and
went droning on into the first few moments of the play.
Old Mole's memory of it was hazy, but sufficiently alive to quarrel
with some of the impressions he now had of it and to enable him to
distinguish between the work of the actors and the work of the author.
The play was worse and better than he had thought. In his recollection
it was not so entirely unscrupulous in its appeal to the surface
emotions, nor so extraordinarily adroit in sliding off into a dry, sly
and perfectly irrelevant humor just at the moment when those base
appeals looked as though they were going to be pushed so far as to
offend even the thickest sensibilities. Each curtain was brought down
with a neat, wistful little joke, except at the end of the third act,
when, in silence, Lossie, the little unloved heroine of the play,
prepared to cook the supper for the husband who had just left her. In
the fourth act he came back and ate it, so that all ended happily. The
atmosphere was Lancashire, and the actors spoke Scots, Irish, Belfast,
Somerset, and Wigan, but that did not seem to matter. The actress who
played Lossie spoke with a very good Thrigsby accent, and her
performance was full of charm. She had a fine voice and knew how to
use it, and her awkwardness of gesture suited the uncouthness with
which the Lancashire folk were endowed. She and the sad little jokes
carried all before them, and there was tremendous applause at the end
of each act and the close of the play.
Mr. Henry Butcher made a grateful little speech, and, looking toward
Old Mole's box, said the author was not in the house. All eyes were
turned toward the box, and the shouting was renewed.
Entirely unconscious of the attention and interest they were arousing,
the party escaped. Robert was hungry and insisted on having oysters.
As they ate them they discussed the play. Robert and Matilda were
enthusiastic, Old Mole was dubious and depressed, and Panoukian
contemptuous.
"I've seen worse," he said, "but nothing with quite so much
effrontery. It was like having your face dabbed with a baby's powder
puff. I felt all the time that in a moment they would have a child
saying its prayers on the stage. But they never did, and there was
extraordinary pleasure in the continual dread of it, and the continual
sense of relief. And every now and then they made one laugh. I believe
it will succeed."
It succeeded. The critics unanimously agreed that the new play had
charm, and, said one of them: "It is with plays, as with women; if
they have charm, you need look no further. All London will be at
Lossie's feet."
At the end of the first week Old Mole received a check for one hundred
and ten pounds; at the end of the second a check for one hundred and
twenty-five. He sent two cablegrams to Carlton Timmis and Cuthbert
Jones at Crown Imperial, British Columbia. No answer. Timmis (or
Jones) had disappeared.
Money poured in.
The play was bought by cable for America, and five hundred pounds
passed into Old Mole's account. It became almost a horror to him to
open his letters lest they should contain a check.
Worst of all, the newspapers scented "copy." A successful play, a
vanished author, no one to claim the fame and fortune lying there. One
paper undertook to find Carlton Timmis. It published photographs of
him, scraps of biography and anecdotes, but Timmis remained hidden,
and the newspapers yelled, in effect, "Where is Timmis? The public
wants Timmis. Wireless has tracked a murderer to his doom, surely it
cannot fail to reveal the whereabouts of the public's new darling?"
Another journal found its way to the heart (_i.e.,_ the box office) of
the theater and asked in headlines, "_Is Butcher Paying Royalties_?"
Butcher wrote to say that he was paying royalties to the owner of the
play, whose name was not Carlton Timmis. And at last a third newspaper
announced the name of the beneficiary of the play--H. J. Beenham.
Gray's Inn was besieged. Old Mole was in despair and declared that
they would have to pack up and go away until the uproar had died down,
but, more sensibly, Matilda invited a journalist in, gave him a drink,
and told him the little there was to tell. The next check was for a
hundred and eighty pounds.
Money poured in.
Five companies were sent out with "Lossie Loses" in America, three in
England, and the play was given in Australia and South Africa. It was
also published. Money poured in. It came in tens, in hundreds, in
thousands of pounds. It became a purely automatic process, and Old
Mole quickly lost interest in it and ceased to think about it. He told
himself that it would soon come to an end, that such a violent
eruption of gold could not last very long, and his attention was
engrossed by its effects.
In his own mind it had brought about no moral crisis like that of his
first catastrophe, but, insensibly, it had altered his point of view,
given him a sense of security that was almost paralyzing in its
comfort. All his old thoughts had been in self-protection against the
people with whom he had come in contact, people to whom he was a
stranger, different from themselves, and therefore suspect. But now in
London when he met new people they bowed before him, put themselves
out to ingratiate him, almost, it seemed, though he hated to think so,
to placate him. His name was known. He was Mr. Beenham, and was
somehow responsible for "Lossie Loses," which everybody had seen and
the public so loved that three matinées a week were necessary, and
there were beginning to be Lossie collars and Lossie hats and Lossie
muffs and Lossie biscuits and Lossie corsets. . . . And his sister had
called on Matilda and removed that source of bitterness. And at the
club men sought his acquaintance. He had letters from more than one of
his old colleagues at Thrigsby and several of his former pupils sought
him out. A few of them were distinguished men--a doctor, a barrister,
a journalist, the editor of a weekly literary review. They invited him
to their houses, and he was delighted with the ease and grace with
which Matilda bore herself and was more than a match for their wives,
and became friendly with one or two of them. They moved among people
whose lives were easy and smooth-running in roomy, solidly furnished
houses, all very much like each other in style and taste. The people
they met at these houses in South Kensington and Hampstead were almost
monotonously alike. At the doctor's house they met doctors, at the
barrister's solicitors and more barristers, at the editor's
journalists and writers. They were different only in their
professions: those apart, they were as alike as fossil ammonites in
different strata: and they all "loved" "Lossie Loses." The women were
very kind to Matilda and invited her to their tea parties and "hen"
luncheons. She read the books they read and began to have "views" and
opinions, and to know the names of the twentieth century poets; she
picked up a smattering of the jargon of painting and music just as she
caught the trick of being smart in her dress, and for the same reason,
because the other women had "views" and opinions and talked of music
and painting and were smart in their dress. The eruption of gold into
their lives had blown her desire to return to the theater into the
air. She was fully occupied with dressing, buying clothes, ever more
clothes, and arranging for the hospitality they received and gave.
Her husband was amazed at the change in her. It was as startling as
the swift growth of a floundering puppy into a recognizable dog. It
was not merely a matter of pinning on clothes and opinions and a set
of fashionable ideas: there was real growth in the woman which enabled
her to wear these gewgaws with ease and grace so that they became her
and were an ornament, absurd it is true, but so generally worn--though
rarely with such tact--that their preposterousness was never noticed
in the crowd. She was gayer and easier, and she seemed to have lost
the tug and strain at her heart. Often in the daytime she was dull and
listless, but she never failed to draw upon some mysterious reserve of
vitality for the evening.
He was sometimes alarmed when he watched the other women who had not
her freshness, and saw how some of them had ceased to be anything but
views and opinions and clothes. But he told himself that she was not
tied, as the rest were, by their husband's professions, to London, and
that they could always go away when they were tired of it. . . . He
was often bored and exhausted, but he put up with it all, partly
because of the pleasure she was finding in that society, and partly
because he felt that he was getting nearer that indeterminate but
magnetically irresistible goal which had been set before him on--when
was it?--on the night when his thoughts had taken form and life and he
had been launched into that waking dreamland. With that, even the most
violent happenings seemed to have very little to do; they were almost
purely external. One might have a startling adventure every day, and
be no nearer the goal. One might have so many adventures that his
capacity to enjoy them would be exhausted. There was, he felt sure, as
he pondered the existence of these professional people and saw how
many of them were jaded by habit, but were carried on by the impetus
of the habits of their kind, so that they were forever seeking to
crowd into their days and nights far more people, thoughts, ideas,
books, æsthetic emotions than they would hold--there was somewhere in
experience a point at which living overflowed into life and was
therein justified. So much seemed clear, and it was that point that he
was seeking. In his relationship with Matilda, in his love for her, he
had striven to force his way to it. The violence of his meeting with
her, the brutality of his breach with his old existence, had, by
reflex action, led him to violence and brutality even in his kindness,
even in his attempted sympathy.
That seemed sound reasoning, and it led him to the knowledge that
Matilda had plunged into the life of the professional people with its
round of pleasures and functions, its absorption in tailors and
mummers and the amusers of the people, its entire devotion to
amusement, as a protection against himself. It was an unpleasant
realization, but amid so much pleasantness it was bracing.
Money poured in. "Lossie Loses" was visited by all the Royal Family.
When it had been performed two hundred and fifty times the Birthday
Honors list was published and Henry Butcher was acclaimed "our latest
theatrical knight." He gave a supper party on the stage to celebrate
the two occasions; and he invited Mr. and Mrs. Beenham.
There were present the Solicitor-General, Mr. Justice Sloppy, the
three celebrated daughters of two dukes, the daughters-in-law of three
Cabinet Ministers, a millionaire, two novelists, five "absolutely
established" dramatists, three dramatic critics, nine theatrical
knights, the ten most beautiful women in London, the Keeper of the
Coptic Section of the South Kensington Museum, Tipton Mudde, the
aviator, and Archdeacon Froude, the Chaplain of the Actors' Union.
There were others who were neither named nor catalogued in the
newspaper (Court and Society) next day. As Mr. Justice Sloppy said, in
the speech of the evening: "For brains and beauty he had never seen
anything like it. . . ." The toasts were the King, Sir Henry Butcher,
Lossie, and the Public, and there, as Panoukian remarked when the
feast was described to him, you have the whole thing in a nutshell,
the topnotch of English philosophy, the expression of the English
ideal, lots of food, lots of drink, lots of talk, of money, of people,
and then a swollen gratitude--"God bless us every one." And Panoukian
then developed a theory that England, the English character, had
reached its zenith and come to flower and fruit in the genius of
Charles Dickens. Thereafter was nothing but the fading of leaves, the
falling of leaves, the drowsing into hibernation. He was excited by
the idea of falling leaves to describe the intellectual and moral
activity of the country. It would seem to explain the extraordinary
predominance of the Harbottles, who were so thick upon every English
institution that Vallombrosa was nothing to it.
Old Mole met Tyler Harbottle again, and, allowing for Panoukian's
youthful exaggeration, had to admit the justice of his estimate.
Harbottle was very like a falling leaf, blown hither and thither upon
every gust of wind, dropping, skimming, spinning in the air, but all
the time obeying only one impulse, the law of gravity, which sent him
down to the level of the ground, the public. Seeing nothing but the
public, nothing beyond it, hoping for nothing but a comfortable
resting place when at last he came to earth, Harbottle was under the
illusion that the winds that tossed him came from the public, and when
they blew him one way he said, "I will go that way," and when they
blew him another he said, "I will go this." He was a Unionist Free
Trader in theory and by label: in practice he was an indefatigable
wirepuller. By himself he was unimportant, but there were so many of
him and his kind that he had to be placated.
Old Mole met all the Harbottles. After Sir Henry Butcher's party he
and Matilda were squeezed up into a higher stratum of society. Tipton
Mudde took Matilda up in his monoplane and thereafter their whole
existence grew wings and flew. They now met the people of whom their
professional acquaintances had talked. The triumph of "Lossie Loses"
continued: it was said the play would beat the record of "Our Boys."
Money poured in, and almost as bewildering was the number of
invitations--to vast dinner parties, to at homes, to drawing-room
meetings, to boxes at the Opera, to luncheons at the luxurious hotels,
to balls, to political receptions, to banquets given to celebrate
honors won or to mark the end of a political campaign, or to welcome
an actor-manager home from Australia. Whenever a Harbottle pulled out
a plum from the pie than the subtler Harbottles buzzed like flies
around it and arranged to eat and drink and make merry or at least to
make speeches.
For a time it was very good fun. Old Mole and Matilda did as the
Harbottles did. They had so many engagements that they were compelled
to buy a motorcar and to engage a chauffeur. Without it Matilda could
never have found time to buy her clothes. She went to the dressmaker
patronized by all the female Harbottles, but the dressmaker made for
an old-fashioned duchess, who adhered to the figure of the nineties
and refused to be straight-fronted. The female Harbottles fled from
this horrid retrogression and made the fortune of an obscure little
man in Chelsea.