on the top of English life, its head and front--for the great-leisured
governing classes no longer governed; they had feudal possessions but
not the feudal political power--was a little world whizzing like a
zoetrope. You might peep through the chinks and the figures inside it
would seem to be alive, but when you were inside it there were just a
number of repetitions of the same figures in poses disintegrated from
movement. The machine whizzed round, but what was the force that moved
it? Impossible to enter it except by energy or some fluke that made
you rich enough or famous enough for there to be flattery in your
acquaintance. True, Old Mole only saw the figures inside the machine
arranged for pleasure. They were workers, too, but their pleasure was
a part of their work. Lawyers who were working eighteen hours a day
could find time to visit three great entertainments in an evening;
politicians after an all-night sitting in the House could dine out,
see two acts of the Opera, or the ballet, or an hour or so of a revue,
and then return to the division Lobbies; actors, after two
performances in the day, could come on to a reception at midnight and
eat caviare and drink champagne. There were very few of whom it could
be said that the rout was the breath of their nostrils; but all
continued in it, all accepted it as a normal condition of things, as
the proper expression of the nation's finest energies. Impossible to
avoid it, furtherance of ambition and young devotion to an ideal both
led to it. . . . Pitchforked into it so suddenly, with so many vivid
impressions after wanderings, Old Mole felt how completely it was cut
off from the life of the country, because from the inside and the
outside of the machine things looked so entirely different. He had to
go no further than his own case. On all hands he heard it said so
often that "Lossie Loses" was a wonderful play--"so delicate, so
fanciful, so full of the poetry of common things"--that it needed only
a very little weakening of his critical faculty for him to begin to
believe it and greedily to accept the position it had given him. As it
was, knowing its intrinsic falsehood and baseness, he marveled that
people of so much intelligence could be bemused by success into such
jockeying of their standards. But he began to perceive that there were
no standards, neither of life nor of art. There could not be, for
there was no time for valuation, just as there was no time for
thinking. Here and there he found an ideal or two, but such wee, worn,
weary little things, so long bandied about among brains that could not
understand them and worried into a decline by the shoddy rhetorical
company they had been forced to keep. Arguing from his own case, Old
Mole came to the conclusion that the whole whirligig had come about
from a constant succession of decent ordinary mortals having been,
like himself, the victims of an eruption of gold which had carried
them, without sufficient struggle or testing of imagination or moral
quality, to an eminence above their fellows, upon which, in their
bewilderment, they were conscious of nothing but a dread of falling
down. In that dread, sharing no other emotion, they clung together
fearfully, met superficially, were never content unless they were
meeting superficially, creating flattery and even more flattery to
cover their dread. And, as they were forever gazing downward into the
depths from which they had been raised, it was impossible for them to
see more than a yard or so further than their own feet. Fearful of
taking a false step, they never moved; their minds curled up and went
to sleep. They could create nothing, and could only imitate and
reproduce. They had abandoned the dull habits of the middle class and
yet were the slaves of middle-class ideas. There were very charming
people among them, but they accepted good-humoredly that England had
nothing better to offer. They had pleasant houses in Town and in the
country, delightful and amusing people to visit them, to keep them
from boredom, and they asked no more.
Old Mole studied the history of England, the railway frenzy, the
growth of the manufacturing districts, the foundation of the great
shipbuilding yards, the immense eruption of gold that had swept away
the old, careless, negligent, ruling squires, and set in their place
those who could survive the scramble. And the scramble had never
ceased; it had been accepted as the normal state of things. The heat
and excitement of the rout gave the illusion of energy, which, being
without moral direction, was pounced upon by the English desire for
comfort and the appearance of solidarity, the mania for having the
best of everything in the belief that it will never be bettered. So
against the inconveniences of an antiquated system of laws, a mean and
narrow code of morals, the consequences of their own reckless
disregard of health in the building of the great cities of industry,
in the payment of those who labored in them, they padded themselves in
with comfort, more and more of it.
"Almost," said Old Mole, "I am persuaded to become a Jew, to sweat the
sweaters, pick the profits, rule the world in honor of the cynical
Hebrew god who created it, and live in uneasy triumph in the domestic
virtues and worship of the flesh uncrucified."
Once you have been drawn into the machine it is very difficult to get
out of it. Old Mole struggled, but money and invitations came pouring
in. "Lossie Loses" survived two holiday seasons. During the second the
actress who played Lossie went away on her vacation, and Matilda,
urged on by Butcher, with whom she had become friendly, played the
part, was successful, and gave the piece a new spurt of vitality. It
was not a brilliant performance, but then a brilliant performance
would have killed the play. The play needed charm, Matilda had it,
and, by this time, among so many expertly charming women, she had
learned how to manipulate it. Her appearance on the stage extended her
popularity among her distinguished acquaintances, but subtly changed
her status, and she had to learn how to defend herself. Her life
became more exciting and she expanded in response to it. She
distressed Old Mole by talking about her adventures, and he began to
think it was really time to go.
They went abroad for several months, to Paris, Florence, Rome, Sicily,
Algiers, but as they stayed in luxurious and expensive hotels they
might almost as well have stayed in London. Old Mole discovered
nothing except that the eruption of gold must have been universal and
that the character of the English nation had found its most obvious
expression in its stout, solid, permanent telegraph poles.
They returned to London, and Matilda accepted a small part in a new
play by a famous dramatist, who had borrowed "Lossie" from the
"greatest success of the century," called her "Blendy," and set her to
leaven the mixture he had produced after the two years' hard work
fixed as the proper quantum by Henrik Ibsen.
More success.
And Old Mole, feeling that he was now beyond all hope of escape, since
he was suffering from a noticeable fatty degeneration of the will, had
argued with Matilda, but she had had her way, for he could find no
rejoinder to her plea that it was "something to do."
He refused to leave Gray's Inn. She was tired of it; said the rooms
were cramped, but he clung to it as an anchorage.
There was a steadying of their existence. She took her work seriously,
and rested as much as possible during the day. In the evenings he
missed her, and he detested having his dinner at half-past six. But
the discomfort was a relief and gave him a much needed sharpening of
the wits. Every night he met her at the theater and made more
acquaintances in it. He applied his theory of the eruption of gold to
them, and, studying them for that purpose, was amazed to find how
little different they were from Mr. Copas and the miserable John
Lomas. Copas had been untouched by the eruption. These men, and
particularly Henry Butcher and Matilda's manager, were Copas varnished
and polished. Beneath the varnish they were exactly the same;
self-important, self-centered, entirely oblivious of life outside the
theater, utterly unheeding of everything outside their profession that
could not be translated into its cant and jargon, childishly jealous,
greedy of applause, sensitive of opinion, boys with the appetites and
desires of grown men, human beings whose development had been
arrested, who, in a healthy society, would be rogues and vagabonds, or
wandering adventurers, from sheer inability to accept the restrictions
and discipline imposed by social responsibility. They were cruelly
placed, for they were in a position needing adult powers, having
audiences night after night vaster than could be gathered for any
divine or politician or demagogue; they had to win their own
audiences, for no theater was subsidized; and when they had won them
they were mulcted in enormous sums for rent; they were sucked, like
the other victims of the eruption, into the machine, the zoetrope, and
being there, in that trap and lethal chamber of spontaneity, they had
to charm their audiences, with nothing more than the half-ideas, the
sentimental conventions, the clipped emotions of their fellow
sufferers. They were squeezed out of their own natures, forced into
new skins, could only retain their positions by the successful
practice of their profession, and were forced to produce plays and
shows out of nothing, being robbed both of their Copas-like delight in
their work and of their material for it. Their position was calamitous
and must have been intolerable without the full measure of applause
and flattery bestowed on them.
Clearly it was not through the theater that Old Mole could find the
outlet he was seeking.
He turned wearily from its staleness, and told himself, after long
pondering of the problem, that he had been mistaken, that he had been
foolishly, and a little arrogantly, seeking in life the imaginative
force, the mastery of ideas and human thoughts and feelings that he
had found in literature. Life, maybe, proceeds through eruption and
epidemic; art through human understanding and sympathy and will. . . .
That pleased him as a definite result, but at once he was offended by
the separation, yet, amid so much confusion, it was difficult to
resist the appeal of so clean and sharp a conception. It lost the
clarity of its outline when he set it against his earlier idea of
living brimming over into life. . . . There were then three things,
living, life and art, a Trinity, three lakes fed by the same river.
That was large and poetic, but surely inaccurate. For, in that order,
the lakes must be fed by a strange river that flowed upward. . . .
Anyhow, it was something to have established the three things which
could comprise everything that had penetrated his own consciousness,
three things which were of the same essence, expressions of the same
force. Within the action and interaction there seemed to be room for
everything, even for Sir Henry Butcher, even for Tyler Harbottle, M.P.
He had arrived at the sort of indolent charity which, in the machine,
passes for wisdom and sanity, the unimaginative tolerance which furs
and clogs all the workings of a man's mind and heart. It is not far
removed from indifference. . . . In his weariness, the exhaustion and
satiety of the modern world, he measured his wisdom by the folly of
others, and in his satisfaction at the discrepancy found conceit and
thought it confidence. He began to write again and returned to his
projected essay on Woman, believing that he had in his idea
disentangled the species from Matilda. He was convinced that he had
risen above his love for her, to the immense profit of their
relationship, which had become more solid, settled and pleasurable. As
he had planned when they came to London, so it had happened. They had
gone their ways, seemed for a time to lose sight of each other, met
again, and were now--were they not?--journeying on apace along life's
highway, hailing the travelers by the road, aiding the weary, cracking
a joke and a yarn with those of good cheer, staying in pleasant inns.
"Something like a marriage!" thought he. "Life's fullest adventure."
And he measured his marriage against those of the men and women in the
machine; sour captivity for the most part, or a shallow, prattling and
ostentatious devotion.
His essay on Woman was only a self-satisfied description of his
marriage. Out of the writing of it came no profit except to his
vanity. Preoccupied with questions of style, he pruned and pared it
down, refashioned and remodeled it until at last he could not read it
himself. Having no convenient sands in which to bury it, he gave it to
Panoukian to read.
Panoukian was in that stage of development (which has nothing to do
with age) when a man needs to find his fellows worshipful and looks
for wonders from them. He was very young, and kindness from a man
older than himself could bowl him over completely, set his affections
frothing and babbling over his judgment, so that he became enslaved
and sycophantish, and prepared, mentally if not physically, to stand
on his head if it so happened that the object of his admiration could
be served by it. He was in a nervous state of flux, possessing small
mastery over his faculties, many of which were only in bud; his life
was so little his own, was so shapeless and unformed that there could
be no moderation in him; his admirations were excessive, had more than
once landed him in the mire, so that he was a little afraid of them,
and to guard against these dangers sought refuge in intolerance. To
prevent himself seeing beauty and nobility and being intoxicated by
them, he created bugbears for himself and hated them, and was forever
tracking them down and finding their marks in the moot innocent
persons and places. He was very young, mightily in love with love, so
that he was forever guarding himself from coming to it too early and
being fobbed off with love cheapened or soiled. His passion was for
"reality," of which he had only the most shapeless and uncommunicable
conception, but he was always talking about it with fierce
denunciations of all the people who seemed to him to be deliberately,
with criminal folly, burking it. For this reality his instinct was to
preserve himself, and he lived in terror of his loneliness driving him
to headlong falls from which he might never be able to recover. He was
a full-blooded, healthy young man and must have been wretchedly
unhappy had it not been that people, in their indolent, careless way,
were often enough kind to him to draw off some of his accumulated
enthusiasm in an explosive admiration and effusive, though tactfully
manipulated, affection. Old Mole was kinder to him than anyone had
ever been except his father, but then his father had had no other
methods than those of common sense, while in Old Mole there was a
subtlety always surprising and refreshing. Also Old Mole was prepared
almost indefinitely, as it seemed, to listen to Panoukian's views and
opinions and rough winnowing of the wheat from the chaff of life, so
far as he had experienced it.
Panoukian therefore read Old Mole's manuscript with the fervor of a
disciple, and found in it the heat and vigor which he himself always
brought to their discussions. The essay, indeed, was like the master's
talk, cool and deliberate, broken in its monotony by comical little
stabs of malice. The writing was fastidious and competent. Panoukian
thought the essay a masterpiece, and there crept a sort of reverence
into his attitude toward its author. This was an easy transition, for
he had never quite shaken off the rather frightened respect of the
pupil for the schoolmaster. Then, to complete his infatuation, he
contrasted Old Mole with his employer, Harbottle.
And Old Mole was fond of Panoukian. At first it was the sort of amused
tenderness which it is impossible not to feel on the sight of a leggy
colt in a field or a woolly kitten staggering after a ball. Then, by
association and familiarity, it was enriched and became a thing as
near friendship as there can be between men of widely different ages,
between immaturity and ripeness. It saved the situation for both of
them, the young man from his wildness, the older from the violent
distortion of values which had become necessary if he were to move
easily and comfortably in the swim. Above all, for Old Mole, it was
amusing. For Panoukian nothing was amusing. In his intense longing for
the "reality" of his dreams he hated amusement; he detested the vast
expenditure of energy in the modern world on making existence charming
and pleasant and comfortable, the elaborate ingenuity with which the
facts of life were hidden and glossed over; he despised companionable
books, and fantastical pictures and plays, luxurious entertainments,
magazines filled with advertisements and imbecile love-stories,
kinematographs, spectacular football, could not understand how any man
could devote his energies to the creation of them and retain his
sincerity and honesty. He adored what he called the English genius,
and was disappointed and hurt because the whole of English life was
not a spontaneous expression of it, and he found one of his stock
examples in architecture. He would storm and inveigh against the
country because the English architectural tradition had been allowed
to lapse away back in the dark ages of the nineteenth century. He had
many other instances of the obscuring or sudden obliteration of the
fairest tendencies of the English genius, and to their mutual
satisfaction, Old Mole would put it all down to his theory of the
eruption of gold.
Nearly all Panoukian's leisure was spent at Gray's Inn or out with Old
Mole and Matilda, or with them on their visits to those of their
friends to whom they had introduced him. He was good-looking, well
built, easily adept at ball-games--for he possessed a quick, sure
eye--and his shy frankness made him likeable. The charm of English
country life would soften his violence and soothe his prejudices, but
only the more, when he returned to London, would he chafe against the
incessant pursuit of material advantages, the mania of unselective
acquisition, the spinning and droning of the many-colored humming-top.
From the first moment he had been Matilda's slave, and no trouble was
too great, no time too long, no task too tedious, if only he could
yield her some small service. He would praise her to Old Mole:
"She is so real. Compare her with other women. She does all the things
they do, and does them better. She takes them in her stride. She can
laugh with you, talk with you, understand what you mean better than
you do yourself, give you just the little encouragement you need, and
you can talk to her and forget that she is a woman. . . . You don't
know, sir, what an extraordinary difference it has made in my life
since I have known you two."
That would embarrass Old Mole, and he found it impossible to say
anything without jarring Panoukian's feelings. Therefore he would say
nothing, and later he would look at Matilda, watch her, wait for her
smile, and wonder. Her smile was the most surprising, the most
intimate gift he ever had from her. Often for days together they would
hardly see each other and, when they met, would have little to say,
but he would watch until he could meet her gaze, win a smile from her,
and feel her friendliness, her interest, and know that they still had
much to share and were still profoundly aware of each other. He would
say to her sometimes:
"I don't see much of you nowadays."
She would answer:
"But you are so interested in so many things. And I like my life."
And in the gentle gravity with which she now spoke to him, which was
in every gesture of her attitude toward him, he would discern a fuller
grace than any he had hoped to find in her. She was so trim and neat,
so well disciplined, so delicate and nice in all she did; restrained
and subtle but with no loss of force. Even her follies, the absurd
modish tricks she had caught in the theater and among the women who
fawned on her, seemed no impediment to her impulse should the moment
come for yielding to it. She was no more spendthrift of emotion and
affection than she was of money, and, almost, he thought, too thorough
in her self-effacement and endeavor to be no kind of burden upon him.
"I am so proud of you!" he would say.
And she would smile and answer:
"You don't know, you never will know, how grateful I am to you."
But her eyes would gaze far beyond him, through him, and light up
wistfully, and he would have a queer discomfortable sensation of being
a sojourner in his own house. Then he would think and puzzle over
Panoukian's rapturous description of her. She was discreet and
guarded: only her smile was intimate; her thoughts, if she had
thoughts, were shy and never sought out his; demonstrative she never
was. She led a busy, active life, the normal existence of moneyed or
successful women in London, and she was distinguished in her
efficiency. She had learned and developed taste, and was ever
transforming the chambers in Gray's Inn, driving out Robert and
installing in every corner of it the expression of her own
personality. After the first dazzling discovery of the possibilities
of clothes she had rebelled against the price charged by the
fashionable dressmakers and made her own gowns. Robert used to twit
her about her restlessness, and declared that one week when he came he
would find her wearing the curtains, and the next her gown would be
covering the cushions. Old Mole used to tease her, too, but what she
would take quite amiably from Robert she could not endure from him.
"I thought you'd like it," she would say.
"But, my dear, I do like it!"
"Then why do you make fun of me?"
And sometimes there would be tears. Once it came to a quarrel, and
after they had made it up she said she wanted a change, and went off
to stay with Bertha Boothroyd. In two days she was back again with the
most maliciously funny description of Jim's reception of her and his
absolute refusal to leave her alone with Bertha lest she should be
contaminated. Then she was gay and light-hearted, glad to be back
again and more busy than ever, and when Panoukian came to see them she
teased him out of his solemnity and earnestness almost into tears of
rage. She told him he ought to go to Thrigsby and work, find some real
work to do and not loaf about in London, in blue socks and white
spats, waiting until he was old enough to be taken seriously.
He went away in the depths of misery, and she said to Old Mole:
"Why don't you find him something to do?"
"I? How can I find him. . . ?"
"Don't you know that you are a very important person? You know
everybody who is anybody, and there is nobody you can't know if you
want to. Think of the hundreds of men in London who spend their whole
lives struggling to pull themselves up into your position so that in
the end they may have the pleasure of jobbing some one into a billet."
"That," said Old Mole, "is what Panoukian calls Harbottling."
She made him promise to think it over, and he began to dream of a
career for Panoukian, a real career on the lines of Self-Help.
In his original pedagogic relation with Panoukian he had blocked out
for him an ascent upon well-marked and worn steps through Oxford into
the Home Civil Service, wherein by the proper gradations he should
rise to be a Permanent Under-Secretary and a Knight, and a credit to
the school. To the altered Panoukian and to Old Mole's changed and
changing mind that ambitious flight was now inadequate. Panoukian was
undoubtedly intelligent. Old Mole had not yet discovered the idea that
could baffle him, and he was positively reckless in his readiness to
discard those which neither fitted into the philosophy he for the
moment held nor seemed to lead to a further philosophy at which he
hoped to arrive. Every day Panoukian became more youthful and every
day more breathlessly irreverent. Nothing was sacred to him: he
insisted on selecting his own great men, and Old Mole was forced to
admit that there was some wisdom in his choice. He read Voltaire and
hated organized religion; Nietzsche and detested the slothfulness and
mean egoism of the disordered collection of human lives called
democracy; Butler and quizzed at the most respected and dozing of
English institutions; Dostoevsky and yearned out in a thinly
passionate sympathy to the suffering and the diseased and the victims
of grinding poverty. He was not altogether the slave of his great men:
after all they were dead; life went on and did not repeat itself, and
he (Panoukian) was in the thick of it, and determined not to be
crushed by it into a cushioned ease or the sodden insensibility of too
great misery.
"My problem," he would say, "is myself. My only possible and valid
contribution to any general problem is the effective solution of that.
In other words, can I or can I not become a human being? If I succeed
I help things on by that much; if I fail, I become a Harbottle and
retard things by that much. Do you follow me?"