hastily and her clothes were littered about the room in an untidiness
most unusual with her. She stuffed what she was reading under her
pillow.
"You didn't wait for me," he said.
"No. I didn't want to see anybody. I rushed away before the end."
"Anything wrong?"
"I hate the theater. I hate it all, the people in it, the blinding
lights, the painted scenery, the audience, oh! the audience! I don't
ever want to go near it again. It's just playing and pretending.
. . ."
"The piece was certainly nothing but a pretence at drama."
"Oh! Don't talk about it."
"But I want to know what has upset you."
"I can't tell you. I don't know myself. I only know that I'm
miserable, miserable. Just let me be."
He had learned that when she was ill or out of sorts or depressed she
never had any desire left in her but to curl up and hide herself away.
At such times the diffidence inherent in her character seemed wholly
to master her, and there was no rousing her to a better grace. He
withdrew, his exaltation dampened, and repaired to his study, where in
the dark at his desk in the window he sat gazing out into the night,
at the few lighted windows of the Inn, and the bruise-colored glow of
the sky. He could think only of her and now it seemed to him that he
could really lose himself and live in her, and through her come to
love. He remembered how, when she was rehearsing, he had asked how she
was progressing, and she had replied: "I shall never get it. Either
the part's all wrong or I am." And that evening she had "got it,"
reached what the author had been fumbling after, the authentic note of
human utterance, the involuntary expression of love. It had alarmed
himself: how devastating must it then have seemed to her! It was
almost horrible in its irrelevance. It came from neither of them and
yet it was theirs, but not for sharing. It had driven her, like a
beast on a stroke of illness, to hide away from him, but through her
and only through her could he approach it. The abruptness of its
outburst, its geyser-like upward thrust, made it alone seem natural
and all their life of habit artificial and shabby; how much more then
the stale and outworn tricks of the theater! He approached it,
worshiping, marveling at the sense of release in his soul, and knew
that, with the power it gave him, he had bitten through the crust of
life, whereat he had been nibbling and gnawing with his mind and
picking with the chipped flints of philosophies. And he was awed into
humility, into admission of his own impotence, into perception, clear
and whole, of the immensity of its life's purpose, of its huge force
and mighty volume bearing the folly and turbulence of mind and flesh
lightly on its bosom, so that a man must accept life as to be lived,
can never be its master, but only its honorable servant or its
miserable slave. He had then the sense of being one with life, from
which nothing was severed, not the smallest bubble of a thought, not
the least grain of a desire, of possessing all his force and a
boundless reserve of force, and he whispered:
"I love."
And the mighty sound of it filled all the chambers of his life, so
that he was rich beyond dreams.
He laid his head in his arms and wept. His tears washed away the
stains of memory, the scars and spotted dust upon his soul, and he
knew now that he had no longer to deal with an idea of life, but with
life itself, and he was filled with the desperate courage of his
smallness.
For a brief space after a storm of summer rain the world is a place of
glowing color, of flowing, harmonious lines. So it was now with Old
Mole, and he discovered the charm of things. His habitual life went on
undisturbed, and he could find pleasure even in that. His love for
Matilda reduced him to a sort of passiveness, so that he asked nothing
of her, gave her of himself only so much as she demanded, and was
content to watch her, to be with her, to feel that he was in no way
impeding her progress.
She showed no change save that there was a sort of effort in her
self-control, as though she were deliberately maintaining her old
attitude toward him. She never made any further allusion to her avowed
hatred of the theater, and returned to it as though nothing had
suffered. He told himself that it was perhaps only a mood of
exhaustion, or that, though she might have passed through a crisis,
yet it was possible for her to be unaware of it, so that its effects
would only gradually become visible and very slowly translated into
action. After all, she was still very young, and the young are
mercifully spared having to face their crises. . . . When he went to
see her play her part again she had mastered her scene by artistry;
the almost barbaric splendor of her outburst was gone; she had a trick
for it, and her little scene became, as it was intended to be, only a
cog in the elaborate machinery by which the entertainment moved.
This time Panoukian was with him, and denounced the piece as an
abomination, a fraud upon the public--(who liked it immensely)--and he
produced a very ingenious, subtle diagnosis of the diseases that were
upon it and submitted it to a thorough and brutal vivisection, act by
act, as they sat through it. Old Mole was astonished to find that
Panoukian's violence annoyed him, offended him as an injustice, and,
though he did not tell him so, saw clearly that he was applying to the
piece a standard which had never for one moment been in the mind of
the author, whose concern had been to the best of his no great powers
to contrive an amusing traffic which should please everybody and
offend none, supply the leading actors with good and intrinsically
flattering parts, tickle the public into paying for its long-continued
presentation, and so pay the rent of the theater, the formidable
salary list, and provide for the satisfaction of his pleasures, the
caprices of his extremely expensive wife, and his by no means peculiar
mania for appearing in the columns of the newspapers and illustrated
journals; pure Harbottling; but it had nothing at all to do with what
Panoukian was talking about, namely, art. It was certainly all out of
drawing and its moral perspective was all awry, but it was hardly more
fantastical and disproportionate than Panoukian's criticism. It was
entirely unimportant: to apply a serious standard to it was to raise
it to a level in the mind to which it had no right. Of the two, the
author and Panoukian, he was not sure but Panoukian was the greater
fool. However, extending his indulgence from one to the other, he let
the young man talk his fill, and said nothing. He had begun to
treasure silence.
He loved the silent evenings in Gray's Inn, where he could sit and
smoke and chuckle over the world's absurdity, and ponder the ways of
men so variously revealed to him in the last few years, and gloat over
his own happiness and dream of the days when Matilda should have come
to the full bloom of her nature and they would perfectly understand
each other, and then life would be a full creation, as full and
varied, as largely moving as the passing of the seasons. He had
delightful dreams of the time when she would fully share his silence,
the immense region beyond words. He was full of happiness, gummy with
it, like a plum ripe for plucking--or falling.
In his fullness of living--the very top, he told himself, of his age,
of a man's life--he found it easy to cover paper with his thoughts and
memories, delightful and easy to mold them into form, and to amuse
himself he began a work which he called "Out of Bounds," half
treatise, half satire on education, dry, humorous, mocking, in which
he drew a picture of the members of his old profession engaged in
hacking down the imaginations of children and feeding the barren
stumps of their minds with the sawdust of the conventional curricula.
He was very zestful in this employment, perfectly content that Matilda
should be even less demonstrative than before, telling himself that
she was wrestling with the after effects of her crisis and would turn
to him and his affection when she needed them. He made rapid progress
with his work.
"Lossie Loses" came to an end at last, and he counted the spoils. He
had gained many thousands of pounds--(the play was still running in
America)--a few amusing acquaintances, a career for his wife, and an
insight into the workings of London's work and pleasure which he would
have found it hard to come by otherwise. He chuckled over it all and
flung himself with fresh ardor into his work.
After the hundredth performance of her play Matilda declared that she
was tired, and wanted a rest, and she threw up her part. She came to
him and said she wished to go away.
"Very well. Where shall we go?"
"I want to go alone."
And she waited as though she expected a protest from him. For a moment
she gazed at him almost with pleading in her eyes, and then she
governed herself, stood before him almost assertively and repeated:
"Alone."
In the aggression he felt the strain in her and told himself she was
wanting to get away from him, to break the habit of their life, to
come back to him fresh, to advance toward him, reach up to the prize
he held in his hands. He told himself that to break in upon her
diffidence might only be to thicken the wall she--(he said it was
she)--had raised between them. He said:
"Won't you mind?"
"No. I want to be alone."
"Where will you go then?"
"I don't know. Anywhere. By the sea, I think."
He suggested the Yorkshire coast, but she said that was too far and
she didn't like the North.
"Oh! No!" he said. "Want to forget it?"
She passed that by.
He took down a map, and she looked along the south coast and pitched
on a place in Sussex, because it was far from the railway and would
therefore be quiet. He left his work, wired to the hotel for rooms,
sat and talked to her as she packed, saw her off the next morning and
returned to his work, rejoicing in the silence and emptiness of the
chambers.
He sent her letters on to her without particularly noticing their
superscription. On the third day a letter came for her, and he
recognized the handwriting as Panoukian's. He sent that on. When his
work went swimmingly and his pen raced he wrote to her, long, droll,
affectionate epistles: when his work hobbled then he did not write and
hardly gave a thought to her. She wrote to him in her awkward hand
with gauche, conventional descriptions of the scenery amid which she
was living. He read them and they gave him fresh light on education.
He was reaching the constructive part of his work, and it began to
take shape as an exposition of the methods by which the essential
Matilda might have been freed of the diffidence and self-distrust
which hemmed her in. That brought him to feminism, and he imagined a
description of women in Trafalgar Square screaming in a shrill
eloquence for deliverance from the captivity into which they had been
cast by the morals of the sand heap. He was keenly interested in this
scene, and, as he had sketched it, was not sure that he had the
topography of the Square exact.
One evening, therefore, he dined at his club, meaning to walk home by
the Square and the Strand. He was drawn into an argument and did not
set out before ten o'clock. It was one of those nights when heavy
clouds lumber low over the city and absorb the light, break the chain
of it so that the great arcs are like dotted lanterns, and behind them
buildings loom. He turned down Parliament Street to get the full
effect of this across the Square, and then came up across and across
it, carefully observing how the great thoroughfares lay in relation to
the Nelson Column. As, finally, he was crossing to the Strand he was
almost dashed over by a taxicab, drew back, looked up, saw his wife
gazing startled out of the window. He stared at her, but she did not
recognize him and seemed to be entirely absorbed in the fright and
shock of the avoided accident. He followed the car with his eyes. It
had turned sharply in the middle of the road to pass into the
southward stream of traffic. He saw it slow down and draw up outside a
huge hotel, and hurried after it. The porter came out and opened the
door. Matilda stepped to the pavement, and after her Panoukian. They
passed in through the revolving door of the hotel just as he reached
the pavement. The porter staggered in with Matilda's portmanteau.
Old Mole lunged forward on an impulse. He reached the door and glared
through the glass. The hall was full of people, there was a great
coming and going. He could see neither Matilda nor Panoukian. He
turned and walked very slowly down the steps of the hotel. There were
four steps. He reached the pavement and was very careful not to walk
on the cracks. At the edge of the pavement he stopped and stared
vacantly up at the Nelson Column. Small and black against the heavy
clouds stood the statue, and almost with a click Old Mole's brain
began to think again, mechanically, tick-tocking like a clock,
fastening on the object before his eyes, and clothing it with
associations.
"Nelson--Romney--Lady Hamilton--Lady Hamilton--Emma--Nelson's
enchantress--Nelson," and so on all over again. . . . The action of
his heart was barely perceptible, a slow beat, a buzzing at his ears.
"Nelson--Romney----"
He stood gazing up at the statue. The clouds behind it moved and gave
it the appearance of moving. It was very certain that the sword moved.
. . . "England expects. . . ." He gazed fascinated. A little crowd
gathered. Men and women stood around and behind him and gazed up. He
was aware of them, and he said:
"Idiots."
But he could not move. The crowd spread over the pavement and blocked
the way. A policeman appeared and moved them on. He jostled Old Mole.
"Move on, there. You're causing an obstruction."
Old Mole stared at him stupidly.
The officer spoke to him again, but made no impression. Old Mole
stared at the hotel as though he were trying to remember something
about it, but he did not move. The officer hailed a taxi, bundled him
into it, and drove with him to the police station. In the charge room
there was confabulation, and Old Mole gaped round him: the furniture,
the large men in uniform swam mistily before him. One of the men
approached him sympathetically, and he heard a voice say:
"Can't make nothink of it, sir."
His brain fastened on that as expressing something that it was trying
to get clear. He felt a slight relaxation of the numbness that was
upon him.
Another voice said:
"What's your name?"
"Name?" said Old Mole.
The man in front of him said:
"The Inspector says: What's the name?"
"Panoukian," said Old Mole.
VI
OUT OF IT
_When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing._
THE QUEEN OF HEARTS
VI
OUT OF IT
THE name acted as an aperitive on Old Mole's faculties, he opened his
eyes and mouth very wide and ate his breath like a fish, and began
eloquently to apologize to the policemen for the trouble he had given
them. He diagnosed his condition as a brief suspension of the
reasoning faculties, a perfectly normal affliction to which all men
were liable. The policemen listened to him stolidly and exchanged
slow, heavy winks, as to say that they had indeed drawn a strange fish
out of the sea of London. Their prize was soon able to give a coherent
account of himself, and they let him go with no worse than a request
to pay the cost of the cab in which he had been brought.
There was heavy rain when he reached the streets. The people were
coming out of the theaters and halls, scurrying along under umbrellas,
darting for cover, wrestling their way into cabs and omnibuses and
Tube stations. The streets were like black mirrors, or deep sluggish
rivers, with the lights drowned in them. The people were all hurrying
to get out of the rain. Old Mole was indifferent to it, and more
acutely than ever was he visited by the sense of having nothing in
common with them. By sheer force of numbers they presented themselves
to his mind as obscene. At one point he was caught in a crowd and so
offended by the smell of warm flesh, wet clothes and heated india
rubber that he was for a moment possessed by a desire to strike the
nearest man. He restrained himself and walked on. In front of him
there were a brace of marketable women profiting by the weather to
display their legs up to their knees. His mind raced back to the
Puritanism in which he had been nurtured, and he was filled with the
Antonine heated horror of women. . . . All the way home he was beset
with sights and scenes that accentuated his disgust.
It was not until he reached Gray's Inn that he was faced with the
pathetic absurdity of his situation, and then he found it unthinkable.
There was not an object in the chambers but cried aloud of Matilda.
She had made the place beautiful, changed its tone from masculine to
feminine, and she was there though she was absent. It was very grim
and horrible; like coming on the clothes of a beloved creature of
whose death he had been told. He played with the idea of death
voluptuously. She was dead, he told himself; his own end was not far
off. The shadow of it was over the place. He went from room to room,
fingering her possessions, touching the stuffs and garments he had
last seen in her hands. He opened her wardrobe and thrust his hands
among her soft gowns. He stood by her bed and patted the pillow and
smoothed the coverlet. He caught sight of himself in her mirror and
told himself that he could see her face, too. And she was very young,
too young to be dead: and he was startlingly, haggardly old. Surely
the end could not be far off.
He went from room to room, picturing her in each as he had last seen
her.
He pushed his mood of horror to its extremity so that he was nigh sick
with it.
All night in his study he prowled round and round. He locked himself
in, locked the outer door, locked all her rooms and pocketed the keys.
She would not, she should not, come back. No one should enter. The
obscenity of the streets clung to him and he could see his situation
in no other light. All his life he had regarded the violation of
marriage as a thing so horrible that it could only happen among
monsters and therefore so remote from himself as to find no place in
his calculations. There was a certain side of human life which was
settled by marriage. Outside it was obscenity, from the poison of
which marriages were impregnably walled in. The walls were broken
down; a filthy flood swamped the fair city of his dreams, and for a
short while he was near mad with thoughts of lust and jealousy and
revenge. He knew it but could not away with it. There was an
extraordinary pleasure, a giddy delight in yielding to the flood,
giving rein to the long penned up forces of the animal in him, and
breaking into childish, impotent anger.
Slowly he lingered, and he began to imagine, to invent, what others
would think of him--Robert, his sister, his acquaintances at the club,
and there was a sort of pleasure in the writhing of his vanity. He
despised himself for it, but he wallowed in it. Never before had he
seen such a quantity of mud and its appeal was irresistible.
When at last he crawled out of it he sat in rueful contemplation of
himself and went back to the cause of it all: the averted accident in
Trafalgar Square, the hotel door swinging--the low-hanging clouds, the
crowd, the Nelson statue. . . . Nelson: Emma. And Old Mole laughed:
after all, there were distinguished precedents, Sir William Hamilton,
most of the friends of Julius Cæsar, Hans von Bülow, George II. The
thing had happened even in Thrigsby, but there it had been only a tale
to laugh at, with pitying condemnation for the husband and a sudden,
irrepressible envy of the lover; envy, neither more nor less; he felt
gratified at the honesty of this admission, though not a little
surprised at it. It was like a thin trickle of cold water upon his
fever, invigorating him, so that he struggled to break through the
meshes of sentimentality in which he had been caught. He broke free,
and to his astonishment found himself sitting at his desk and turning
over the closely written sheet which he had left on the blotting pad.
He corrected a serious mistake in the topography of Trafalgar Square
and went on writing. . . . The outcry of the women against the moral
atmosphere of the sand heap reached up to a noble eloquence in which
were declared their profound pity and sympathy for the men trapped in
sensuality and habitual vice. They declared their ability to think of
men as suffering human beings, wounded and deformed by ignorance and
prejudice, and asked only for the like true chivalry from men. He
drained the vat of his ideas dry, and, at last, at five o'clock in the
morning, exhausted, he went to bed.
He awoke to a sense of novelty and unfamiliarity in his surroundings
and in himself, welcomed the new day with the thankfulness of health,
splashed lustily in his bath, jovially slapped his belly as he dried
himself, and chuckled at its rotundity, regarded it as a joke, the
private particular joke of middle age. Almost it seemed as though his
body had a separate personality of its own, certainly it had many
adventures, many inward happenings of which he was not aware, a
variety of processes beyond his discernment. That amused him mightily.
. . . He remembered the horrors of the night. It must have been a
nightmare! Of course, a nightmare was often followed with a feeling of
health and a grotesque humor!
There were three letters on his breakfast table. One was from Matilda,
posted the day before at the Sussex village. She said she was well,
though the weather was bad, and she was getting rather more loneliness
than she had bargained for. She sent her love and hoped he was happy
without her. He tore up the letter and burned it, and turned back the
thoughts and memories it had summoned forth. He applied himself
hungrily to his breakfast and took careful note of the process of
eating, trying to discover why it should be pleasant and why, slowly,
it should take the zest off his appetite for the day's doings.
"Queer," he thought, "how little interest we take in the body. It
might be an unfailing source of entertainment. It is not so certain
neither that it is not wiser than the mind."
All day he harped on thoughts of the body and was fiercely busy
scrubbing his own clean of the base ideas of the night. He was fairly
rid of them at last toward evening, but his mind was in a horrid
confusion, and he was rather alarmed at the hard appearance of
actuality taken on by his body. It blotted everything else out. He saw
it in the masked light and shade of dirt and cleanliness. From that he
went on to the other seeming opposites--life and death, love and hate,
vice and virtue, light and darkness--found so many of them that he was
semi-hypnotized and sank into an unthinking contemplation. There was
good and there was bad, two points, in the catenary of which he was
slung as in a hammock, with the void beneath. . . . Life as an exact
equation was an impossible, appalling idea; but he could not break
free from it. He could not escape from the trite dualism of things.
. . . From the stupor of ideas he returned to his body and found in
that the same tyranny of the number two: he had two eyes, two ears,
two hands, two feet, two lungs, two kidneys. It comforted him greatly
to reflect that he had only one heart, one nose, one mouth.
"Bah!" he said, "I am making a bogey of my own shadow."
And he resolved to take a Turkish bath before dining at the club. He
did so, and was baked and kneaded and pummeled and lathered back into
a tolerable humor, and, as he lay swathed in warm towels and smoking
an excellent cigar, he faced the situation, yielded to it, let it
sting and nip at his heart, and was so racked with its pain that he
could form no clear idea of it, nor struggle, but only lie limp and
pray to God, or whatever devil had let such furies loose upon him,
that the worst might soon be over before he was betrayed into any
brutal or foolish act. He was amazed to find that his vanity had been
slain: it had died in the night of shock, so he diagnosed it. No
longer was he concerned with what other people would think of himself.
The cruel pain twinged the sharper for it, and he saw that vanity is a
protective crust, a shell grown by man to cover his nakedness. . . .
His general ideas were clear enough: and the amusement of them served
to distract him in his agony. It tickled him to think of a Turkish
bath in Jermyn Street as the scene of such a mighty sorrow, and said: