refreshing, for there was in him something both to touch the
affections and excite the mind, and in his immediate surroundings
there was very little to do as much. There were men who talked, men
who did little or nothing else; but they lacked warmth, they were
Laputans living on a floating island above a land desolate in the
midst of plenty. Among such men it was difficult to conceive of
Panoukian finding a profitable occupation. Take him out of politics,
and where could he be placed? For what had his education fitted him?
Panoukian had had every kind of education. He had begun life in an
elementary school, passed on by his own cleverness to a secondary
school, and from that to the university where contact with the ancient
traditions of English culture, manhood and citizenship had flung him
into revolt and set him thinking about life before he had lived,
braying about among philosophies before he had need of any. There was
a fine stew in his brain, a tremendous array of ideas beleaguering
Panoukian without there being any actual definite Panoukian to
beleaguer. Certainly Old Mole could not remember ever having been in
such a state himself, nor in any generation subsequent to his own
could he remember symptoms which could account for the phenomenon. He
had to look far to discover other Panoukians. They were everywhere,
male and female. He set himself to discover them; they were in
journalism, in science, in the schools of art, on the stage, writing
wonderfully bad books, producing mannered and deliberately ugly verse,
quarreling among themselves, wrangling, detesting each other,
impatient, intolerant, outraging convention and their affectionate and
well-meaning parents and guardians, united only in the one savage
determination not to lick the boots of the generation that preceded
them. When they could admire they worshiped; they needed to admire;
they wanted to admire all men, and those men whom they found
unadmirable they hated.
It was all very well (thought Old Mole) for Matilda with her cool
common sense to say that Panoukian must do something. What could he
do? His only positive idea seemed to be that he would not become a
Harbottle; and how better could he set about that than by living among
the species with the bitterness of his hatred sinking so deep into his
soul that in the end it must become sweetness? In theory Panoukian was
reckless and violent; in practice he was affectionate and generous,
much too full of the spasmodic, shy kindness of the young to fit into
the Self-Help tradition. Indeed, it was just here that the Panoukians,
male and female, were so astonishing. For generations in England
personal ambition had been the only motive force, the sole measure of
virtue, and it was personal ambition that they utterly ignored. They
were truly innocent of it. Upon that axis the society in which they
were born revolved. They could not move with it, for it seemed to them
stationary, and it was abhorrent to them. Their thoughts were not the
thoughts of the people around them. They could neither speak the old
language nor invent a new speech in which to make themselves
understood. Virtue they could perceive in their young hunger for life,
but virtue qualified by personal ambition and subserving it they could
not understand. They were asking for bread and always they were
offered stones. . . . Old Mole could not see what better he could do
than be kind to Panoukian, defend him from his solitude and give him
the use of the advantages in the "swim" of London which he had no mind
himself to employ.
One of the few definite and tangible planks in Panoukian's program was
a stubborn conviction that he must have an "idea" of everything. It
was, he insisted, abominable to live in London unless there was in his
mind a real conception of London.
"You see," he would say, "it would be charming and pleasant to accept
London as consisting of the Temple, the House and Gray's Inn, with an
imperceptible thread of vitality other than my own to bind them
together. We've had enough of trying to make life charming and
pleasant. All that is just swinish rolling in the mud. Do you follow
me? We've had enough. We were begotten and conceived and born in the
mud, and we've got to get out of it; and, unless you see that mud is
mud, you can't see the hills beyond, and the clear rivers, and the
sky. Can you?"
"No, you can't," said Old Mole, groping about in his incoherence, and
speaking only because Panoukian was waiting for a shove into his
further speculations.
"I mean, London may be all in a mess, which it is, but if I haven't a
clear idea of the mess I can't begin to mop it up, and I can't begin
on it at all until I've cleaned up the bit of the mess that is in
myself, can I? I mean, take marriage, for instance."
"By all means, take marriage."
"Well, you're married and I'm not, but it isn't a bit of good
screaming about marriage unless your own marriage is straightened out
and,--you know what I mean?--understood, is it? . . ."
So he would go on, whirling from one topic to another--marriage,
morals, democracy, the will to power,--thinking in sharp contrasts,
sometimes hardly thinking, but feeling always. Vaguely, without
objects, catching himself out in some detestable sentimentality,
admitting it frankly and going back again over his whole argument to
pluck it out. Panoukian was to himself a weedy field, and with bowed
back and stiffened loins he was engrossed in stubbing it. It was
exhausting to watch him at it, and when, as sometimes happened, Old
Mole saw things through Panoukian's eyes he was disquieted. Then there
seemed no security in existence; civilization was no longer an
achievement, but a fluid stream flowing over a varied bed--rock,
pebbles, mud, sand; society was no establishment, but a precarious,
tottering thing, a tower of silted sands with an oozy base, blocking
the river, squeezing it into a narrow and unpleasant channel. In the
nature of things and its law the river would one day gather unto
itself great waters and bear the sands away. . . . Meanwhile men
strove to make the sand heap habitable, for they were born on it,
lived and died on it, and never looked beyond. Their whole lives were
filled with dread of its crumbling, their whole energies devoted to
building up against it and against the action of wind and rain and
sun. They built themselves in and looked not out, and made their laws
by no authority but only by expediency. And the young men, in their
vitality too great for such confinement, knew that somewhere there
must be firm ground, and were determined to excavate and to explore.
And Old Mole wished them well in the person of Panoukian.
That young man set himself to discover London. He was forever coming
to Gray's Inn with exciting tales of streets discovered down by the
docks or in the great regions of the northern suburbs. He set himself
to walk from end to end of it, from Ealing to West Ham, from Dulwich
to Tottenham, and he vowed that there were men really living in it,
and he began to think of the democracy as a real entity, to be exalted
at the thought of its power. Old Mole demurred. The democracy had no
power, since it knew not how to grasp it. Its only instrument was the
vote, which was the engine of the Harbottles, the nibblers, the
place-seekers, the pleasure-hunters, those who scrambled to the top of
the sandy tower, where in the highest cavern there were at least air
and light and only the faintest stench from the river's mud. Here
there was so much divergence between Old Mole and Panoukian that they
ceased to talk the same language, and Old Mole would try another tack
and reach the stop-gap conclusion that the difference came about from
the fact that Gray's Inn was very comfortable, while Panoukian's
chambers in the Temple were bleak and bare. That was unsatisfactory,
for Panoukian would inveigh against comfort and vow, as indeed was
obvious, that no one had yet devised a profitable means of spending a
private income of thirty thousand a year. After reading an economic
treatise he came to the conclusion that the whole political problem
resolved itself into the wages question. Old Mole hated problems and
questions. They parched his imagination. His whole pleasure in
Panoukian's society lay in the young man's power to flood ideas with
his vitality. He argued on economic lines and gradually forced the
young man up to the spiritual plane and then gave him his conception
of society as a sand heap. That fired Panoukian. Was it or was it not
necessary for human beings to live upon shifting ground, with no firm
foothold? And he said that the great men had been those who had gone
out into the world and brought back tales of the fair regions
contained therein.
"They have dreamed of fair regions," said Old Mole, "but no man has
ever gone out to them."
"Then," said Panoukian, "it is quite time some one did."
Matilda came in on that, caught the last words, and asked hopefully:
"What is it you are going to do?"
"He is going," said Old Mole, "to discover the bedrock of life and
live on it."
"Is that all?" Matilda looked disappointed. "I hoped it was something
practical at last."
The two men tried to carry on the discussion, but she closured it by
saying that she wanted to be taken out to dinner and amused. Panoukian
flew to dress himself in ordered black and white, and Matilda said to
Old Mole:
"The trouble with you two is that you have too much money."
"That, my dear, is the trouble with almost everybody, and, like
everybody else, we sit on it and talk."
"It would do you both a world of good to have some real hard,
unpleasant work."
"I can't agree with you. For twenty-five years I had real, hard,
unpleasant work five days in the week, and it profited neither myself
nor anybody else. I went on with it because it seemed impossible to
leave it. It left me, and my life has been a much brighter and
healthier thing to me. Panoukian is young enough to talk himself into
action. I shall go on talking forever."
And he went on talking. Matilda produced a workbox and a pile of
stockings and began darning them. They sat one on either side of the
fireplace, and in the chimney sounded the explosive coo of a pigeon.
"My dear," said Old Mole, "you know, I believe in Panoukian. I believe
he will make something of himself. I fancy that when he is mature
enough to know what he wants he will be absolutely ruthless in making
for it."
"Do you?"
Matilda rolled a pair of stockings up into a ball and tossed them into
a basket on the sofa some yards away. It was a neat shot, and Old Mole
admired the gesture with which she made it, the fling of the arm, the
swift turn of the wrist.
"I do," he said. "Until then there can be no harm in his talking."
"No. I suppose not. But you do go on so."
Panoukian returned. Matilda made ready, and they set out. Old Mole
took them up to the Holborn gate and watched them walk along toward
Chancery Lane. It was a July evening. He watched them until they were
swallowed up in the hurrying crowd, the young man tall and big,
towering above Matilda small and neat. He saw one or two men in the
street turn and look at her, at them perhaps, for they made a handsome
couple. He admired them and was moved, and a mist covered his
spectacles. He took them off and wiped them. Then, kindling to the
thought of a quiet evening to end in the excitement of their return,
he walked slowly back under the windows flaring in the sunset.
"Truly," he said, "the world is with the young men. There can be no
pleasanter task for the middle-aged than to assist them, but, alas! we
can teach them nothing, for, as the years go by, there is more and
more to learn."
He sat up until half-past one with the chamber growing ever more chill
and empty, and his heart sinking as he thought of accidents that might
have befallen them. He was asleep on their return and never knew its
precise hour. They gave a perfectly frank and probable account of
their doings: dinner at a grill-room, a music-hall, supper at a German
restaurant, and then on to an At Home at the Schlegelmeiers', where
there had been a squash so thick that once you were in a room it was
impossible to move to any of the others. They had been wedged into the
gallery of the great drawing-room at Withington House, where the
principal entertainment had been a Scotch comedian who chanted lilting
ballads. It was this distinguished artist's habit to make his audience
sing the chorus of each song, and it had been diverting to see
duchesses and ladies of high degree and political hostesses singing
with the abandon of the gods at an outlying two-shows-a-night house:
_Rolling, rolling in the heather,
All in the bonny August weather,
There was me and Leezy Lochy in the dingle,
There was Jock and Maggie Kay in the dell,
For ilka lassie has her laddie,
And ilka laddie has his lassie,
And what they dae together I'll na tell,
But Leezy, Leezy Lochy in the dingle,
Is bonny as the moon above the heather._
Matilda sang the song all through and made Old Mole and Panoukian
troll the chorus. There were a freshness and warmth about her that
were almost startling, full of mischief and sparkling fun. She teased
both the men and mysteriously promised them a great reward if they
could guess a riddle.
"My second is in woman but not in man, my first is French, I have two
syllables, and you'll never guess."
"Where did you get it?" asked Panoukian.
"I made it up."
So they tried to guess and soon confessed themselves beaten. Then she
told them that the second half of the riddle was _sense_, because she
never knew a man who had it; and the first half was _non_ and together
they made _nonsense_, because she felt like it.
Her mood lasted for five days. Panoukian came in every evening--(she
was rehearsing for a new play, but only in the daytime)--and they
frolicked and sang and burlesqued their own solemn discussions. On the
sixth day her high spirits sank and she was moody and silent. She
forbade Panoukian to come in the evening. He came at teatime, and she
stayed out. One day Old Mole had tea with Panoukian. They walked in
the Temple Gardens afterward, and Panoukian blurted out:
"I don't know if your wife has told you, sir, but after we left the
Schlegelmeiers' it was such a glorious night, and we were so glad to
be in the air again, that we took a taxi and drove down to Richmond
and came back in the dawn. There wasn't any harm in it, as you and I
see things, but I've been thinking it over and come to the conclusion
that you ought to know."
A sudden anger took possession of Old Mole, and he retorted:
"Of course, if there were any harm in it, you wouldn't tell me."
"Hang it all, sir. You haven't any right to say that to me."
"No, no. Quite right. I haven't. No. I beg your pardon. I'm glad to
see you such friends. She isn't very good at making friends.
Acquaintances come and go, but there seem to be very few people whom
she and I can share."
"I have the profoundest respect for her," said Panoukian. "As we were
coming back in the dawn she told me all her life. The things she has
suffered, the misery she has come through."
And they fraternized in their sympathy for Matilda. Panoukian gave an
instance of her early sufferings. She had never told it to her
husband, and he returned to Gray's Inn puzzled and uneasy, to find her
sitting idle, doing nothing, with no pretence at activity. He was
tender with her, and asked if she might be ill. She said no, but she
had been thinking and wanted to know what was the good of anything.
She said she knew she never could be like the other women they knew;
it wasn't any good, they seemed to feel that she was different and
hadn't had their education and pleasant girlhood, and they only wanted
her because they thought she was a success. He told her that he wanted
nothing less than for her to be like the other women, that he never
wanted her to live in and be one of the crowd, but only to be herself,
her own brave, delightful self.
"That's what Arthur says." (They had begun to call Panoukian _Arthur_
during their few days of high spirits.) "He says you've got to be
yourself or nothing. And I don't understand, and thinking makes it so
hard. . . ." She did not want him to speak. She said, "You still love
me? You still want me?"
And there came back to him almost the love of their wanderings, the
old desire with its sting of jealousy.
For three days after that she never once spoke to him.
It seemed she wrote to Panoukian, for he appeared again on her last
night before the opening of the new play, and was there when she
returned from the dress rehearsal. She shook hands with him, made him
sit by the fireplace opposite Old Mole, took up some sewing, and said:
"Now talk."
After some diffidence Panoukian began, and they came round to "Lossie
Loses," the last weeks of which had at length been announced. It would
have run for two years and two months. Panoukian's theory of its
success was that people were much like children, and once they were
pleased with a story wanted it told over and over again without a
single variation.
"The public," said Matilda, "are very funny. When they don't listen to
you, you think them idiots; when they do, you adore them and think
them wonderful."
"I have never felt anything but contempt for them for liking 'Lossie
Loses,' " said Old Mole.
"But then," put in Panoukian, "you did not write it. If you had, you
would be persuaded by now that it is a masterpiece. That is how
Harbottles are made: they attribute their flukes to their skill and
insist on being given credit for them."
"I often wonder," said Old Mole, "what the man who wrote it thinks
about it. He must surely know by now."
"He must be dead." Matilda swept him out of consideration with her
needle. "I don't believe any man would have let it go on so long and
not come forward."
Panoukian examined the ethical aspect of the situation, and from that
they passed to the discussion of morals, whether there was in fact any
valid morality in England, or simply those things were not done which
were unpleasant in their consequences. The Ten Commandments were
presumably the basis of the nation's morality, since they were read
publicly in places of worship every Sunday (though the majority of the
adult population never went near any place of worship). How many of
the Commandments were closely observed, how many (in the general
custom) met with compromise, how many neglected? Murder and the more
obvious forms of theft were punished; deliberate and wicked fraud,
also, but at every turn the morality had been modified, its bad
admitted to be not always and altogether bad, its good equally subject
to qualification. It had been whittled and chipped away by
non-observance until practically all that was left was a bad
consisting of actions which were a palpable nuisance to society, with
never a good at all.
"Either," said Panoukian, "the Jewish morality has never been suitable
for the Western races or they have never been intelligent enough to
grasp its intention or its applicability to the facts of life and the
uses of society."
"I wish you wouldn't use so many long words," said Matilda.
But Panoukian rushed on:
"I can't believe in the justice of a morality which is based on the
idea of punishment. It is inevitable that such a system should set a
premium on skill in evading consequences rather than on right action."
"I believe," said Old Mole, "in tolerance, you can't begin to hold a
moral idea without that."
"Right," said Matilda, "is right and wrong is wrong. I always know
when I'm doing right and when I'm doing wrong."
"But you do it all the same?" asked Panoukian.
"Oh, yes."
"And so does every healthy human being. So much for morality."
"Don't you believe that people are always punished?" asked Old Mole.
"Certainly not. There are thousands of men who go scot free, and so
sink into self-righteousness that more than half their faculties
atrophy, and not even the most disastrous calamity, not even the most
terrible spiritual affliction, can penetrate to their minds."
"That," said Old Mole, "is the most horrible of punishments and seems
to me to show that there is a moral principle in the universe. I find
it difficult to understand why moralists are not content to leave it
at that, but I have observed that men apply one morality to the
actions of others and another to their own. The wicked often prosper,
and the righteous are filled with envy and pass judgment, wherein they
cease to be righteous."
"My father," said Matilda, "was a very bad man, but I was fond of him.
My mother was a good woman, and I never could abide her."
"It is all a matter of affection," quoth Panoukian with more than his
usual emphasis.
"I agree," muttered Old Mole.
And all three were surprised at this conclusion. They were uneasily
silent for a moment or two, when Panoukian departed. Then Matilda rose
and came to her husband and held out her hand. He took it in both his
and looked up at her.
"Good night," she said.
"Good night."
"Until to-morrow."
And slowly the smile he loved came to her face. Warmed by it and
encouraged, he said:
"Is anything worrying you?"
The smile disappeared.
"No. Nothing. I'm beginning to think about things, and you. It's all
so queer. . . . Good night."
And she was gone.
He attended the first night of the new play. Matilda had a larger
part, and one very short scene of emotion, or, at least, of what
passed for it in the English theater of those days, that is to say it
was a nervous and sentimental excitement altogether disproportionate
to the action, and not built into the structure of the play, but
plastered on to it to conceal an alarming crack in the brickwork.
Matilda did very well and only for a moment let the scene slip out of
the atmosphere of gimcrackery into the air of life. She did this
through defective technique, but that one moment of genuine feeling,
even in so false a cause, was so startling as to whip the audience out
of its comfortable lethargy into something that was so near pleasure
that they could not but applaud. It was an artistic error, since it
was her business to be as banal and shallow as the play, which had
been made with great mechanical skill so that it required only the
superficial service of the actors, and, unlike the candle of the Lord,
made no attempt to "search out the inward parts of the belly." In her
part Matilda had to discover and betray in one moment her love for the
foppish hero of the piece, and being, as aforesaid, wanting in her
technical equipment, drew, for the purpose of the scene, on her own
imagination, and that which--though she might not know it--had
possession of it. The audience was startled into pleasure, Old Mole
into something like terror. There was in the woman there on the stage
a power, a quality, an essence--he could not find the word--on which
he had never counted, for which he had never looked, which now, he
most passionately desired to make his own. He knew that it was not
artistry in her, his own response to it had too profoundly shaken him;
it was living fire, flesh of her flesh, and marvelously made her, for
the first time, kin and kind with him. And he knew then that he had
been living on theory about her, and was so contemptuous of it and of
himself that he brushed aside all thought of the past, all musings and
speculations, and was all eagerness to join her, to tell her of the
amazing convulsion of himself, and how, at last, through this
accident, he had recognized her for what she was. . . . He could not
sit through the rest of the play. Its artificiality, its inane
falsehood disgusted him. He went out into the brilliantly lighted
streets and walked furiously up and down, up and down, and on. And the
men and women in the streets seemed small and mechanical, utterly
devoid of the vital principle he had discerned in his wife's eyes,
voice, gesture, as she played her part. They were just a crowd,
mincing and strutting, bound together by nothing but the capacity to
move, to place one leg before another and proceed from one point to
another of the earth's surface. He had that in common with them, but
nothing else: nothing that bound him to them. (So he told himself, and
so truly he thought, for he was comparing a moment of real experience
with a series of impressions made on him by his surroundings.) He
walked up and down the glittering streets, streaked with white and
yellow and green and purple lights, and the commotion in him waxed
greater. . . . When he returned to the theater Matilda was gone, and
had left no message for him.