or Elsinore or the palace of Andromache, and nobler, for mine is a
real and no poet's tragedy. It is a true tragedy, or, my vanity being
dead, I should not bother my head about it. . . . Is my vanity dead? I
have shed it as a crab his claw or a lizard his tail. It will grow
again."
He sank deep into pain until it seemed to him he could suffer no more,
and then he went over to his club and dined fastidiously--a crab (to
inspect its claw), a quail, and a devil on horseback, with a bottle of
claret, very deliberately selected in consultation with the head
waiter. Throughout his meal he read the wine list from cover to cover
and back again, and thought how closely it resembled the Thrigsby
school list. It contained so many familiar names that he was put out
at its not including Panoukian's, and of Panoukian slowly he began to
think: at first sleepily and in the gross content of his good dinner,
as a wine, heady, sparkling, inclined to rawness, too soon bottled, or
too soon uncorked, he could not be certain which. Then he thought of
Panoukian as a man, and a savage anger burst in upon him, and he
thought of Panoukian's deed as the atmosphere of the club dictated he
should think of it. Panoukian had acted dirtily and dishonorably: he
should be hounded out, hounded out. Panoukian had wormed himself into
his (Old Mole's) affections and trust, to betray both. He had shown
himself a cad, a blackguard, a breaker of the laws of hospitality and
good society. . . . There was a solid plumpness in this conception of
Panoukian that pleased Old Mole almost sensually, gave him the same
sort of mouth-watering anticipation as the breast had done of the
quail he had just eaten. He had Panoukian nicely dished up, brown,
done to a turn: he would poise the knife for one gloating moment,
plunge it in, and cleave the ripe morsel from breast to back.
Panoukian had been cooked by his own actions: he deserved the knife
and the crunch of teeth. Old Mole, like many another good man wronged,
felt ogreish. . . . He began in his head (and with the aid of the wine
in his head) to compose letters to Panoukian, commencing "Sir" or
"Dear Sir," or, without approach, plunging into such a sentence as:
"No matter how public the place, or how painful to myself, I shall,
when I next meet you, be obliged to thrash you."
And he gloated over the thoughts of thrashing Panoukian: mentally
chose the stick, a whippy cane; the fleshy portion of Panoukian's
anatomy under the tails of his too-much-waisted coat. He rejoiced in
the scene. It might be in the House, under the eyes of all the
Harbottles: or, better still, in the Temple before the grinning
porters.
He was brought to himself by a crash and a tinkle. He had waved his
fork in the air and knocked over his last glass of claret. The head
waiter concealed his annoyance in fatherly solicitude and professional
business, and suggested another half-bottle. Weakly Old Mole
consented, and while he was waiting, after collecting his thoughts,
found that they had left Panoukian and come to Matilda. Her image was
blurred: his love had become sorrow and a creeping torment, and the
torment was Matilda, the blood in his veins, inseparable from himself.
And because she was inseparable Panoukian became so, too. There could
be no gain in thrashing Panoukian: that was just blustering nonsense;
"defending his honor" was the phrase. Idiots! He looked round at the
other diners. What was the good of defending that which was lost? What
was there to defend? You might as well ask a sea captain whose ship
had been blown up by a mine why on earth he did not use his guns.
. . . Further, honor was a word for which he could find no precise
meaning. It was much in vogue in the theater, from Copas to Butcher. A
woman's honor apparently meant her chastity. A man's honor, in some
very complicated way, seemed to be bound up in the preservation of
woman's, as though she herself were to have no say in the matter. No;
honor would not do: it was only a red herring trailed across the
scent.
Next came the cause of morality, which demanded the punishment of
offenders. To his consternation he found himself thinking of the
affair impersonally, pharisaically, inhumanly, detaching himself from
Matilda, thrusting her violently away, giving her a dig or two with
the goad of self-righteousness, and swelling at the neck with
conscious rectitude. Why? . . . She must suffer for her sins.
Sin? _Sünde, pécher._ He thought of it in three or four languages, but
in all it created an impression of overstatement and, more, of bad
taste. He had lived for so long with a warm, intimate idea of Matilda
that he resented the intrusion of morality, bidding him stand above
her, judge and condemn. It might be simpler, the easiest attitude to
adopt--a suit of ready-made mental clothes, reach-me-downs--but it was
uncomfortable, cold, and, most astonishing of all, degrading. It was
to be impersonal in a desperately personal matter. _Ça ne va pas._
_Du bist wie eine Blume.
So rein und schön und hold . . ._
Like nearly every lover who has any acquaintance with the German
language, he had tagged Heine's verses on to his beloved. He clutched
at them now. They were still apt. He used them as a weapon with which
to drive back the cause of morality, but he was still very far from
the mastery of himself and the affair--_l'affaire Panoukian._ He was
the victim of a fixed idea--the taxicab, the hotel door swinging
round, the low-hanging clouds, the Nelson statue. . . . George II had
caused the death of Königsmarck, but his sympathies had never been
with George II; besides that was a monarch, and not even the success
of "Lossie Loses" and his acquaintance with half the Cabinet would
enable him with impunity to procure the death of Panoukian. Apart from
the defence of honor and the cause of morality, what do men do in the
circumstances?
He was to receive instruction. . . .
In the reading room he picked up an evening newspaper. It was pleasant
to hold a tangible object in his fingers and to pass into the reported
doings of the great and the underworld. He had heard gossip of the
final catastrophe of a notoriously wretched marriage. The divorce
proceedings were reported in the paper. The husband--Old Mole knew him
slightly and did not like him--gave evidence to show himself as a
noble and generous creature, near heartbroken, and the woman, whom his
selfishness had driven into a desperate love, as light or hysterical.
It was such a distortion of the known facts, such an audacious
defiance of the knowledge common to all polite London, that Old Mole
was staggered. He read the report again. One sentence of the evidence
was almost a direct appeal for sympathy. Knowing the man, he could
picture him standing there, keeping his halo under his coat-tails and
donning it at the right moment. It was theatrical and very adroit.
"Bah!" said Old Mole. "He is groveling to the public, sacrificing even
his wife to the many headed."
And his sympathies were with the woman. At least she had shown
courage, and the man had lied and asked for admiration for it: so
honor was defended and the cause of morality served.
A little knot of men in the room were discussing the case. Their
sympathies were with the man.
"If a woman did that to me," said the nearest man, "I'd thrash her, I
would. Thank God, I'm a bachelor."
"I don't know what women are coming to," said a fat little man, as
cosily tucked into his chair as a hazel nut in its husk. "They seem to
think they can do just as they please."
A tall thin man said:
"It all began with the bicycle. Women have never been the same since
bicycles came in."
"It wouldn't have been so bad," said the fat little man, "if they'd
cut and run."
And Old Mole repeated that sentence to himself.
"What I can't understand is," said the first speaker, who seemed the
most indignant, "why he didn't shut her up until she had come to her
senses. After all, we are all human, and that is what I should have
done. If women won't regard the sacredness of the home, where are we?"
"Surely," said Old Mole, incensed into speaking, "it depends on the
home."
"I beg your pardon, sir," retorted the nearest man with some heat. "It
does not. In these matters you can't make exceptions. Home is home,
and there is no getting away from it. If a woman grows sick of her
home it is her own fault and she must stick to it, dree her own weird,
as the Scotch say. Destroy the home and society falls to the ground."
And Old Mole, sharpened by argument, replied:
"Society is no more permanent than any other institution. Its
existence depends entirely on its power to adapt itself to life. It is
certainly independent of the innumerable sentimental ideas with which
men endeavor to plaster up the cracks in its walls, among which I must
count that of home."
The three men gaped at him. He continued:
"Home, I conceive, has a meaning for children. It is the place in
which they grow up. We make homes for our young as the birds make
nests for theirs. When the children go forth then the home is empty
and is no longer home. Men are no longer patriarchs and no more do
they gather the generations under one roof-tree. . . . In the case
under discussion there were no children, therefore there was never a
home to defend or regard as sacred. Man and woman alike had placed
themselves in a false position. What further they had to suffer we do
not know. We know that the man took refuge in the closest egoism, and
the woman finally in the restless adventure of which we know no more
than has been reported to a newspaper by a dull and mechanical
shorthand writer. My own view is that, where there are no children,
society at large is not interested. Society is only interested in any
marriage in so far as it will provide children to ensure its continued
existence. Once children are born it is interested to see that they
are fed, clothed and educated. (How effectively our present society
pursues that interest you may easily observe if you will visit East or
South London.) Beyond that its interference, explicit or covert, seems
to me to be an unwarrantable intrusion into the privacy of the human
soul. No one of us here is in a position to judge of the affair which
is the occasion of your argument, and . . . and . . . I beg your
pardon for interfering with it."
He rose and passed out the room, leaving three very surprised clubmen
behind him. But none of them could be more surprised than himself:
surprised and relieved he was. He had been sickened at the idea of a
woman being delivered up to the chatter of idle tongues, and in the
violence of his distress had come by an absolute certainty that any
dignified issue to his present affection could only come through an
unprejudiced and unsentimental consideration of the whole facts. It
was not going to be easy; but, dear God, he wanted something
difficult, something really worth doing to counteract his misery. When
he thought of himself and the ache at his heart he was blinded with
tears and could see the facts only from one angle--his own.
_Du bist wie eine Blume,
So rein und schön und hold . . ._
Seen from that angle, Matilda was reduced in stature, distorted, ugly,
mean. But he had loved her, loved her, and must still have the truth
of her: more than ever before he needed to understand her. The beauty
and delight and youth he had enjoyed in her must not go down in
bitterness.
One saying he took away with him from the club:
"It wouldn't have been so bad if they'd cut and run."
Perhaps, he thought to himself, they had "cut and run." And for him it
became worse, to think that she had gone, without a word, with never a
complaint, just gone. He remembered the night when she had said she
was miserable, when he had found her in her bed, after the play, with
her room in a litter. And he fell to thinking of the trials he must
have put upon her, probing for all the possible offences, secret,
subtle, unsuspected, of body and soul that might be laid at his door.
There were many that he could think of, but his darkest hours came
then when he perceived the fine balance, the perilous poise of married
life, the imperceptible dovetailing of interests and habits and
humors, the regions beyond perception where souls meet. Its nice
complications were almost terrifying: at thousands of points men and
women might fail, offend each other, crush each other, destroy, never
dreaming of the cause, never, at the time, marking the effect. For
such an adventure there need be heroism: to break, when even failure
and offence and mutual exasperation bind, strength and courage
superhuman or despairing. And men judge! And condemn! They measure
this subtlest and most searching relationship with opinions and dull
compromise and rules.
He was tortured with the thought of all the injuries he might have
done her, and he invented more, invented burdens that he had never put
upon her to account for her going away from him, with never a word.
For three days he lived in this torment, winding about and about from
general to particular and back again by the most circuitous route, a
_Rundreise_ with the current morality for Baedeker. And every now and
then the obsession would stab home to his heart--the hotel door
swinging, the flat infidelity. Once, when the pain was so mortal that
he could contain himself no longer, he wrote to her at the hotel. He
posted the letter. That was on the second day. On the third he was in
an agony. No answer came.
On the fourth day a telegram arrived from the Sussex village and an
hour later she, brown, healthy, with a grand swing in her walk, a new
depth of bosom, a squarer carriage of the shoulders; a rich bloom on
her. She kissed his cheek.
He stared and stared at her. He looked for change in her.
"You!"
"Didn't you get my telegram?"
"Oh! yes."
"I'll take my things off, and we'll have some tea."
She left him. He stood at the head of the little stairs leading down
to her apartments, and he trembled and was near weeping. In her room
he could hear her singing to herself, happily, blithely as a bird,
with a full note that caught at his heart. She seemed to sing no song,
but a melody, young and joyous with a full summer gaiety. The sun
shone through the staircase window upon his hand where he clutched the
balustrade. He was gripping it so tight that the veins stood out and
the skin on his knuckles was white. A tear fell on his hand and he
looked down at it. It was a plump, podgy, puckered middle-aged hand.
He whisked back into his room as he heard her door open.
They had tea, and he could not take his eyes off her. She thought he
looked ill and pulled down. On his desk she saw the pile of his
papers.
"You've been writing," she said. "You've been overdoing it. It's never
safe to leave a man alone."
"Yes," he replied. "I have written a good deal."
"Is it a story?"
"No. Not exactly a story."
"Is it finished?"
"No. I doubt if it will ever be finished now."
She began to talk of the theater. She had been wired for to resume her
part, as her understudy was proving unsatisfactory. Further she had
had two offers. One to appear in a new musical comedy, the other of a
part in a play to be produced at a little "intellectual" theater for
eight matinées. She felt inclined, she said, to accept both. It would
mean very hard work, but it would be experience, and it was flattering
to be noticed by the superior persons of the stage. And she asked his
advice. He thought it might be too much for her to have so much
rehearsing and to play in the evening as well. That she brushed aside.
She was feeling splendid, strong enough to act a whole play.
"You are becoming a regular Copas," he said.
She laughed; he, too, and they plunged into reminiscences of the old
days.
"I sometimes think," he said, "that those were the happiest months of
my life."
"Nonsense. There's always more and more in front."
"For you."
She went off into peals of laughter, for she had just remembered the
encounter with the prize-fighter. Her sturdy gaiety simply swept him
off his feet, and he could only follow in the train of her mood. They
made so merry that they lost count of the time, and she suddenly
sprang to her feet with a cry and scurried away, dinnerless, not to be
late at the theater.
"I ought to have told her," he said to himself. "I ought to have said:
'I know.' . . . But how fine she looked! How happy she must be!"
Happy? There was something in her mood beyond happiness: a zestful
strength, a windiness that seemed to blow through every cranny of her
soul, whipping the blood in her veins, so that she could not pause for
states and conditions of the spirit, nor check herself to avoid
unhappiness in herself or others. She was like a ship in full sail,
bending to the wind, skimming over tossing seas. She was gallant. She
was what he had always hoped she might become. There was in her such a
new flood of vitality that he felt ashamed at the thought of bidding
her pause to submit to his inquisition. Impossible to check her
flight, cruel suddenly to present her with the meanness of what she
had done while she was still glowing with its splendor.
He had caught something of her glow, and now he wrestled to break free
of rules of conduct and moral codes, and he began, at last, to
consider his problem in terms of flesh and blood. There were three
points of view to be mastered: three lives knotted together in a
tangle and the weakest strand would be broken.
He felt hopeful. There would be a fight for it, and to that he
thrilled. He had the exaltation of one on the brink of great
discovery.
He went to fetch her from the theater. The stagedoor lay at the back
in an alley joining two great thoroughfares. As he entered the alley
from one end he saw Matilda and Panoukian leave by the other, and he
had his arm in hers. Old Mole turned, with the fluttering sense of an
escape, glad not to have met them. And when he had controlled himself
he was amused to think that they could not have dreaded the encounter
more than he.
He took a long walk to delay his return, and when he reached the
chambers they were in darkness. He crept softly down the little stairs
and tried her door. It was locked.
In a moment's panic he thought that this time she had really "cut and
run," and he was almost stunned with his terror of it. It was too
soon, too soon: it would be disastrous; he would be left without
understanding, to the mercy of the obsession; he had not all the
threads in his hands; until he had, it would be rash folly to snap. He
stood against her door, with his ear to the panel, holding his breath,
straining to hear. There were explosive noises in the house. From the
room he could catch nothing for them. Closer and closer he pressed to
the door, his ear against the panel. He lurched and the panel creaked.
Silence. He heard her stir in her bed.
She was there! That was all he wanted to know. On tiptoe he crept
away. . . . She was there! He would yet gather all the threads and
then he or she would snap. One or other would be broken.
What had he then? The evidence of his own eyes. Was that not enough?
It was enough for prescribed remedies, to which he could not resort
without revenge, for which he had not now the least desire. What his
eyes had seen was so isolated, so severed from the rest of his life as
to be monstrous and injurious. By itself it was damnable harlotry.
(There was a sort of boyish satisfaction in fishing out the words of a
grosser age with which to bespatter it and make it even more offensive
to pure-mindedness.) But, as he loved the woman, it could not stand by
itself. He was in it, too. Actions cannot be judged by themselves.
There must have been an antecedent conspiracy of circumstance and
fault to lead to such misdemeanor.
With a tight control of himself he could now almost think of it
without jealousy (hardly any of that was left but the quick, shallow
jealousy of the brute), but he could not think of it without passion,
and through that he could discern its inherent passion and, faintly,
respond to it. That put an end to all mean suspicions of a conspiracy
against himself, or of cowardly contriving to enjoy stolen fruit and
leave no trace. . . . She had locked the door against him. So much was
definite, and he had a sort of envying admiration for her that she
could be precise while he was still floundering and groping for
understanding. . . . Certainly he had never seen her so sure of
herself.
But then, if she were so sure, why did she not "cut and run." Then it
would not be so bad. For a flash he saw the thing with the eyes of a
fat clubman; the passion in him ebbed and he lost grip, and blundered
into a mist. A lunge forward cleared him. She was sure of herself, so
sure that she was giving no thought to her position except as it
immediately presented itself. The new factor in her life called for no
change, and everything she had was enriched by it, her possessions,
her work, even her domestic life. It must all seem to her clear gain,
and therefore she was sure. She loved her love, and everything that
had led to it, and therefore she was sure.
From that flight upward Old Mole came to the sensation of falling. He
was possessed by a prevision, felt that in a moment he would see all
things plain, would know exactly what was going to happen. He strained
forward, felt sleep overcoming him, struggled against it, and fell
asleep.
Then Matilda was busy all day rehearsing, and, during the little time
he had with her, she talked the slang and gossip of the theater. Once
she asked after the work, and he read a little of it to her, and she
liked it and he plucked up courage to go on with it. She laughed at
his cuts at women and admitted that he had thrust home at more than
one of her own foibles. He had written part of a chapter on the
_Theater as Education._ She could make nothing of that. The theater to
her was a place in which you played "parts," sometimes good and
sometimes bad, and you were always waiting for the supreme,
all-conquering "part" to turn up. She did what she was asked to do to
the very best of her ability; that was her work and she did not look
beyond it. The flattering side of London, its pleasures, fashions and
functions had fallen into the background and she gave it just the
attention which her interest seemed to demand. It never struck her as
strange that she should be given no more of a play than her own part
to read, and if she had been given the play would probably not have
read it. She learned her part, movements and gestures, cues during
rehearsal, and never watched any scene in which she did not appear.
By her part in the "intellectual" play she was mystified. None of her
Copas or Butcher tricks were in the least suited to it. She had an
enormous part to learn: all talk, gibes at marriage, and honor, and
wealth, and domesticity, all the fetishes of the theater in which she
was beginning to find her footing. The manager of the theater was his
own producer; he had chosen her because she looked the part, "the
rising temperament," he called it, and he added to her bewilderment
with the invention of elaborate detail to break the flood of talk,
and, in the absence of action, to bind the play together. Everyone in
that theater spoke of the play with awe, so she concealed her
perplexity and brought it to Old Mole.
"There are no scenes in it," she said. "No cues. Nothing you can take
hold of. I say my lines: the other people in the play don't seem to
take any notice of them, but just go on talking. I suppose it's very
clever, but it isn't acting. I don't believe even my uncle could do
anything with it."
He recommended her to read the play, and she procured a copy from the
author. When she had read it she said:
"I know why nothing happens in it. There isn't a soul in it who cares
about anybody else. It's all teasing. They can't do anything else
because they don't care. And they have nothing really to talk about,
so I suppose that's why they discuss the Poor Law Commission, and the
Cat and Mouse Bill, and the Social Evil and all sorts of things I
never heard of."