I

PRELUDE

A SENSITIVE observer, who once spent a week in theatrical lodgings in Thrigsby, has described the moral atmosphere of the place as “harsh listlessness shot with humor.” That is about as far as you can get in a week. It is farther than Herbert Jocelyn Beenham, M.A. (Oxon.), got in the twenty-five years he had given to the instruction of the youth of Thrigsby in its Grammar School—the foundation of an Elizabethan bishop. Ambition ever leads a man away from Thrigsby. Having none, H. J. Beenham had stayed there, achieving the sort of distinction that swelled Tennyson’s brook. Boys and masters came and went, but “Old Mole” still occupied the Sixth Form room in the gallery above the glass roof of the gymnasium.

He was called Old Mole because whenever he spied a boy cribbing, or larking, or reading a book that had no reference to the subject in hand, or eating sweets, or passing notes, he would cry out in a voice of thunder: “Ha! Art thou there, old mole?” Thrigsbian fathers who had suffered at his hands would ask their sons about Old Mole, and so his position was fortified by a sort of veneration. He was one of those men who assume their definite shape and appearance in the early thirties, and thereafter give no clew to their age even to the most curious spinster’s inquisitiveness. Reference to the Calendar of his university shows that at the time of his catastrophe he cannot have been more than forty-eight.

He was unmarried, not because he disliked women, but from indolence, obstinacy, combativeness, and a coarse strain in him which made him regard the female body, attire and voice as rather ridiculous. With married women he was ceremonious and polite: with the unmarried he was bantering. When he had been twenty years at the school he began jocularly to speak of it as his bride, and when he came to his twenty-fifth year he regarded it as his silver wedding. He was very proud when his Form presented him with a smoker’s cabinet and his colleagues subscribed for a complete edition of the works of Voltaire bound in vellum. Best of all was the fact that one of his boys, A. Z. Panoukian, an Armenian of the second generation (and therefore a thorough Thrigsbian), had won a scholarship at Balliol, the first since he had had charge of the Sixth. At Speech Day, when the whole school and their female relatives and the male parents of the prize-winners were gathered in the John Bright Hall, the Head Master would make a special reference to Panoukian and possibly to the happy coincidence of his performance with the attainment of Mr. Beenham’s fourth of a century in the service of the pious and ancient foundation. It was possible, but unlikely, for the Head Master was a sentimentalist who made a point of presenting an arid front to the world lest his dignity should be undermined.

It was with a glow of satisfaction that H. J. Beenham took out his master’s hood and his best mortar-board on the eve of Speech Day and laid them out in his bedroom. This was at five o’clock in the afternoon, for he had promised to spend the evening with the Panoukian family at Bungsall, on the north side of the city. It was a heavy July day and he was rather tired, for he had spent the morning in school reading aloud from the prose works of Emerson, and the afternoon had been free, owing to the necessity of a replay of the Final in the inter-Form cricket championship between his boys and the Modern Transitus. He had intended to illuminate the event with his presence, but Thrigsby in July is not pleasant, and so he had come out by an early train to his house at Bigley in the hills which overflow Derbyshire into Cheshire.

He sat with a glow of satisfaction as he gazed at his hood and mortar-board and thought of Panoukian. He was pleased with Panoukian. He had “spotted” him in the Lower Third and rushed him up in two and a half years to the Sixth. There had been an anxious three years during which Panoukian had slacked, and taken to smoking, and been caught in a cafÉ flirting (in a school cap) with a waitress, and had been content with the superficial ease and brilliance with which he had mastered the Greek and Latin classics and the rudiments of philosophy. There had been a devastating term when Panoukian had taken to writing poetry, and then things had gone from bad to worse until he (Beenham) had lighted on the truth that Panoukian was stale and needed a fresh point of attack. Then he had Panoukian to stay with him at Bigley and turned him loose in French literature and, as a side issue, introduced him to Eckermann’s version of Goethe’s conversation. The boy was most keenly responsive to literature, and through these outside studies it had been possible to lead him back to the realization that Homer, Thucydides, Plato, Virgil and company had also produced literature and that their works had only been masquerading as text-books. . . . The fight was won, and F. J. Tibster of Balliol had written a most gratifying letter of commendation of Panoukian’s performance in the examination. This had yielded the greatest satisfaction to Panoukian pÈre, and he had twice given Mr. Beenham lunch in the most expensive restaurant of Thrigsby’s new mammoth hotel, and now, when Panoukian fils was to leave the wing of his preceptor, had bidden him to meet Mrs. Panoukian—an Irishwoman—and all the Miss Panoukians. The railway journey from Bigley would be hot and unpleasant, and to reach Bungsall it was necessary to pass through some of the most stifling streets in Thrigsby. After the exhaustion of the summer term and the examinations the schoolmaster found it hard to conquer his reluctance. Only by thinking of the cool stream in the Highlands to which it was his habit to fly on the day after Speech Day could he stiffen himself to the effort of donning his dress clothes. (The Panoukians dressed in the evening since their Arthur had been embraced by Balliol and taken to the bosom of the Lady Dervorguilla.) He had a cold bath, and more than ever clearly he thought of the brown water of the burn foaming into white and creamy flecks over the rocks. How thoroughly, he thought, he had this year earned his weeks of peace and solitude.

He would catch the six-twenty-four. He had plenty of time and there would be a good margin in Thrigsby. He could look in at the Foreign Library, of which he was president, and give them his new selection of books to be purchased during the vacation. On the way he met Barnett, the captain of the Bigley Golf Club, and stayed to argue with him about the alterations to the fourteenth green, which he considered scandalous and incompetent. He told Barnett so with such heat and at such length that he only just caught the six-twenty-four and had to leap into a third-class carriage. It was empty. He opened the windows and lay at full length on the seat facing the engine. It was more hot and unpleasant than he had anticipated. He cursed Barnett and extended the malediction to Panoukian. It would have been more pleasant to spend the evening with Miss Clipton, sister and formerly housekeeper to a deceased bishop of Thrigsby, talking about her vegetable marrows. . . . Uncommonly hot. Deucedly hot. The train crawled so that there was no draught. He went to sleep.

He was awakened by the roar of the wheels crossing Ockley viaduct. Ockley sprawls up and down the steep sides of a valley. At the bottom runs a black river. Tall chimneys rise from the hillsides. From the viaduct you gaze down into thousands of chimneys trailing black smoke. The smoke rises and curls and writhes upward into the black pall that ever hangs over Ockley. This pall was gold and red and apricot yellow with the light of the sun behind it. There were folk at Bigley who said there was beauty in Ockley. . . . It was a frequent source of after-dinner argument in Bigley. Beauty. For H. J. Beenham all beauty lived away from Thrigsby and its environment. Smoke and beauty were incompatible. Still, in his half-sleeping, half-waking condition there was something impressive in Ockley’s golden pall. He raised himself on his elbow the better to look out, when he was shocked and startled by hearing a sort of whimper. Opposite him, in the corner, was sitting a girl, a very pretty girl, with a white, drawn face and her hands pressed together, her shoulders huddled and her face averted. Her eyes were blank and expressionless, and there was a great tear trickling down her nose. The light from the golden pall glowed over her face but seemed only to accentuate its misery and the utter dejection of her attitude.

“Poor girl!” thought the schoolmaster. “Poor, poor girl!” He felt a warm, melting sensation in the neighborhood of his breastbone; and with an impulsiveness altogether unusual to him he leaned forward and tried to lay his hand on her. He was still only half awake and was wholly under the impulse to bring comfort to one so wretched. The train lurched as it passed over a point, and, instead of her hand, he grasped her knee. At once she sprang forward and slapped his face. Stung, indignant, shocked, but still dominated by his impulse, urged by it to insist on its expression, he seized her by the wrists and tried to force her back into her seat and began to address her:

“My poor child! Something in you, in your eyes, has touched me. I do not know if I can. . . . Please sit down and listen to me.”

“Nasty old beast!” said the girl.

“I must protest,” replied Old Mole, “the innocence of my motives.” He still gripped her by the wrists. “Seeing you as I did, so unnerved, so——”

The train slowed down and stopped, but he did not notice it. He was absolutely absorbed in his purpose—to succor this young woman in distress and to show her the injustice of her suspicions. She by this time was almost beside herself with anger and fright, and she had struggled so violently—for he had no notion of the force with which he held her—that her hair had tumbled down behind and she had torn the seam of her sleeve and put her foot through a flounce in her petticoat.

He was thoroughly roused now, and shouted:

“You shall listen to me——”

“Let me go! Let me go!” screamed the girl.

The train had stopped opposite a train going in the other direction. The door of the compartment was opened suddenly, and Beenham found himself picked up and flung into the far corner. Over him towered an immense form clad in parson’s clothes—the very type of vengeful muscular Christianity.

In the corner the girl had subsided into hysterical sobs. The parson questioned her.

“Do you know this man?”

“No . . . no, sir.”

“Never seen him before?”

“Never, sir. He—he set on me.”

“Do you prefer a charge against him?”

“Yes, sir.”

Beenham could hardly hear what they said, but he was boiling with indignation.

“I protest——” he said.

“Silence!” shouted the parson. “But for my timely intervention Heaven knows what would have happened. . . . Silence! You and men like you are a pest to society, impervious to decency and the call of religion. . . . Fortunately there is law in the country and you shall know it.”

With that he pulled down the chain above the windows. In a moment or two the scowling guard appeared. The parson described the horrible scene he had witnessed from the train, that was even now moving Londonward, his interference, and declared his intention of seeing that the perpetrator of so vile a deed should be hounded down. He requested the guard to telephone at the next station to the Thrigsby police. A small crowd had collected. They hummed and buzzed with excitement, and fifteen men clambered into the compartment to assist the parson in his heroic defence of the young woman against the now fully awake and furious pedagogue. He tried to speak, but was shouted down: to move toward the parson, but was thrust back into his corner. Every one else had a perfectly clear-cut idea of what had happened. He himself was so busy emerging from his state of hallucination and trying to trace back step by step everything that had happened to produce the extraordinary eruption into what had been at Bigley an empty, ordinary, rather stuffy compartment in a railway train, that he could not even begin to contemplate the consequences or to think, rather, what they might all be moving toward. It was only as the train ran into Thrigsby, and he saw the name, that he associated it with that other word which had been on the parson’s lips:

“Police!”

There was a cold sinking in the pit of his stomach. Out of his hallucination came the remembrance that he had, with the most kindly and generous and spontaneously humane motives, used the girl with violence.—Police! He was given no time for thought. There was a policeman on the platform. A crowd gathered. It absorbed Beenham, thrust him toward the policeman, who seized him by the arm and, followed by the parson and the girl, they swept swiftly along the platform, down the familiar incline, the crowd swelling as they went, along an unknown street, squalid and vibrant with the din of iron-shod wheels over stone setts, to the police station. There a shabby swing door cut off the crowd, and Beenham, parson, girl and policeman stood in the charge room waiting for the officer at the desk to look up from his ledger.

The charge was made and entered. The girl’s name was Matilda Burn, a domestic servant. She was prompted by the parson, who swept aside her reluctance to speak. Old Mole was asked to give his name, address and occupation. He burst into a passionate flow of words, but was interrupted and coldly reminded that he was only desired to give bare information on three points, and that anything he might say would be used against him in evidence. He explained his identity, and the officer at the ledger looked startled, but entered the particulars in slow writing with a scratchy pen. The parson and the girl disappeared. The officer at the ledger cleared his throat, turned to the accused, opened his mouth, but did not speak. He scratched his ear with his pen, stooped and blew a fly off the page in front of him, made a visible effort to suppress his humanity and conduct the affair in accordance with official routine, and finally blurted out:

“Do you want bail?”

Old Mole gave the name and address of his Head Master.

“You can write if you like.”

The letter was written, read by the officer, and despatched. There was a whispered consultation behind the ledger, during which the unhappy schoolmaster read through again and again a list of articles and dogs missing, and then he was led to the inspector’s room and given a newspaper to read.

“Extraordinary!” he said to himself. Then he thought of the Panoukians and began to fidget at the idea of being late. He abominated unpunctuality. Had he not again and again had to punish young Panoukian for indulgence in the vice? The six-twenty-four had given him ample time. He pulled out his watch: Still twenty-five minutes, but he must hurry. He looked round the bare, dingy room vaguely, wonderingly. Incisively the idea of his situation bit into his brain. He was in custody—carcer, a prison. How absurd it was, rather funny! It only needed a little quiet, level-headed explanation and he would be free. The “chief” would confirm his story, his identity. . . . They would laugh over it. Very funny: very funny. A wonderful story for the club. He chuckled over it to himself until he began to think of the outcome. More than once he had served on a Grand Jury and had slept through the consideration of hundreds of indictments: a depressing experience for which the judge had rewarded him with nothing but compliments and an offer of a pass to view His Majesty’s prison. That brought him up with a jerk. He was in custody, charged with a most serious offence, for which he would be tried at the Assizes. It was monstrous, preposterous! It must be stopped at once. What a grotesque mistake! What an egregious, yet what a serious blunder! That officious idiot of a parson!

The Head Master arrived. He glowered at his colleague and seemed very agitated. He said:

“This is very serious, most unfortunate. It is—ah—as well for the prestige of the school that it has happened at the end of term. We must hush it up, hush it up.”

Beenham explained. He told the whole story, growing more and more amazed and indignant as he set it forth. The Head Master only said:

“I form no opinion. We must hush it up. It must be kept out of the papers.”

Not a word more could be wrung from him. With a stiff back and pursed lips he nodded and went away. He returned to say:

“Of course you will not appear at Speech Day. I will write to you as soon as I have decided what had best be done.”

“I shall be at Bigley,” said Old Mole.

He was released on bail and told to surrender himself at the police court when called upon.

In a dream he wandered out into the street and up into the main thoroughfare, along which every day in term time he walked between the station and the school. Impossible to go to the Panoukians; impossible to return to Bigley. Suppose he had been recognized! Any number of his acquaintances might be going out by the six-forty-nine. He must have been seen! Bigley would be alive with it! . . . He sent two telegrams, one to the Panoukians, the other to his housekeeper to announce that he would not be back that night.

He forgot to eat, and roamed through the streets of Thrigsby, finding relief from the strain of his fear and his tormented thoughts in observation. Dimly, hardly at all consciously, he began to perceive countless existences all apparently indifferent to his own. Little boys jeered at him occasionally, but the men and women took no notice of him. Streets of warehouses he passed through, streets of little blackened houses, under railway arches, under tall chimneys, past shops and theaters and music-halls, and waste grounds, and grounds covered with scaffolding and fenced in with pictured hoardings: an immense energy, the center of which was, surprisingly, not the school. He walked and thought and observed until he sank into exhaustion and confusion. In the evening, when the lamps were lit, the main streets were thronged with men and women idly strolling, for it was too hot for purpose or deliberate amusement.

Late, about eleven o’clock, he walked into his club. The porter saluted. In the smoke room two or three of his acquaintances nodded. No one spoke to him. In a corner was a little group who kept looking in his direction, so that after a time he began to feel that they were talking about him. He became acutely conscious of his position. There were muttering and whispering in the corner, and then one man, a tall, pale-faced man, whom he had known slightly for many years, arose from the group and came heavily toward him.

“I want to speak to you a moment,” said the man.

“Certainly. Certainly.”

They went outside.

“Er—of course,” said the man, “we are awfully sorry, but we can’t help feeling that it was a mistake for you to come here to-night. You must give us time, you know.”

Beenham looked the man up and down.

“Time for what?” he replied acidly.

“To put it bluntly,” came the answer, “Harbutt says he won’t stay in the club if you stay.”

Beenham turned on his heel and went downstairs. At the door he met the Head Master coming in, who sourly expressed pleasure in the meeting.

“I shall never enter the club again,” said Beenham.

The Head Master paid no attention to the remark, took him by the arm and led him into the street. There they paced up and down while it was explained that the Chief Constable had been approached and was willing to suspend proceedings until a full inquiry had been made, if Beenham were willing to face an inquiry; or, in the alternative, would allow him twenty-four hours in which to disappear from Thrigsby. The Lord Mayor and three other governors of the school had been seen, and they were all agreed that such an end to Mr. Beenham’s long and honorable connection with the foundation was deplorable.

“End!” gasped Beenham.

“The governors all expressed——” began the Head Master, when his colleague interrupted him with:

“What is your own opinion?”

“I—I——”

“What is your own feeling?”

“I am thinking of the school.”

“Then I am to suffer under an unjust and unfounded accusation?”

“The school——”

“Ach!——”

Impossible to describe the wonderful guttural sound that the unhappy man wrenched out of himself. He stood still and his brain began to work very clearly and he saw that the scandal had already begun to move so that if he accepted either of his chief’s alternatives and had the matter hushed up, or he vanished away within twenty-four hours, it would solidify, crystallize into conical form, descend and extinguish them. If, on the other hand, he insisted on a public inquiry, there would be a conflagration in which, though he might leave the court without a stain on his reputation—was not that the formula?—yet his worldly position would be consumed with possible damage to the institution to which he had given so many years of his life. His first impulse was to save his honor without regard to the cost or damage to others: but then he remembered the attitude of the men in the club, fathers of families with God knows what other claims to righteousness, and he saw that, though he might be innocent as a lamb, yet he had to face public opinion excited by prejudice, which, if he dared to combat it, he would only have enflamed. He was not fully aware of the crisis to which he had come, but his emotion at the idea of severing his connection with the place that had been the central point of his existence spurred him to an instinctive effort in which he began to perceive larger vistas of life. Against them as background everything that was and had been was reduced in size so that he could see it clearly and bioscopically. He knew, too, that he was seeing it differently from the Head Master, from Harbutt, from all the other men who would shrink away from the supposedly contagious danger of his situation, and he admitted his own helplessness. With that his immediate indignation at the conduct of individuals died away and he was left with an almost hysterical sense of the preposterousness of the world in which out of nothing, a misconstruction, a whole mental fabric could be builded beneath the weight of which a normal, ordinary, respectable, hard-working, conscientious man could be crushed. And yet he did not feel at all crushed, but only rather excited and uplifted with, from some mysterious source, a new accretion of strength.

“I see the force of your argument,” he said to his chief. “I see the inevitability of the course you have taken. The story, even with my innocence, is too amusing for the dignity of an ancient foundation and our honorable profession of pedagogy.”—He enjoyed this use of rhetoric as a relief to his feelings, for he was torn between tragedy and comedy, tears and laughter—“To oblige the Lord Mayor, the governors, and yourself, I will accept the generous offer of the Chief Constable. Good-bye. I hope you will not forget to mention Panoukian tomorrow.”

The Head Master pondered this for some moments and then held out his hand. Old Mole looked through him and walked on. He had not gone twenty yards when he began to chuckle, to gulp, to blink, and then to laugh. He laughed out loud, went on laughing, thumped in the air with his fist. Suddenly the laughter died in him and he thought:

“Twenty-five years! That’s a large slice out of a man’s life. Ended—in what? Begun—in what? To show—what is there? Ended in one sleepy, generous impulse leading to disaster. Twenty-five years, slumbered away, in an ancient and honorable profession, in teaching awkward, conceited, and, for the most part, grubby little boys things which they looked forward to forgetting as soon as they passed out into the world.” And he had taken pride in it, pride in a possession which chance and the muddle-headed excitability of men could in a short space of time demolish, pride in the thought that he was half remembered by some hundreds of the citizens of that huge, roaring city from whose turmoil and gross energy he had lived secluded. He looked back, and the years stretched before him tranquil and monotonous and foolish. He totted up the amount of money that he had drawn out of Thrigsby during those years and set against it what he had given—the use of himself, the unintelligent, mechanical use of himself. He turned from this unpleasant contemplation to the future. That was even more appalling. Within twenty-four hours he had to perform the definite act of disappearing from the scene. Beyond that lay nothing. To what place in the world could he disappear? He had one brother, a Chancery barrister and a pompous ass. They dined together once a year and quarreled. . . . His only sister was married to a curate, had an enormous family and small means. All his relations lived in a church atmosphere—his father had been a parson in Lincolnshire—and they distrusted him because of his avowed love for Lucretius and Voltaire. Certainly they would be no sort of help in time of trouble. . . . As for friends, he had none. His work, his days spent with crowds of homunculi had given him a taste for solitude and the habit of it. He had prided himself on being a clubbable man and he had had many acquaintances, but not, in his life, one single human being to whom in his distress he wished to turn. He had liked the crowds through which he had wandered. They had given him the most comforting kind of solitude. He was distressed now that the streets were so empty; shops, public-houses, theaters were closed. How dreary the streets were! How aimless, haphazard and sprawling was the town! How aimless, haphazard and sprawling his own life in it had been!

A woman passed him and breathed a hurried salute. He surveyed her with a detached, though warmly humorous, interest. She was, like himself, outcast, though she had found her feet and her own way of living. With the next woman he shook hands. She laughed at him. He raised his hat to the third. She stopped and stared at him, open-mouthed. As amazed, he stared at her. It was the young woman of the train.

He could find nothing to say, nor she; neither could move. Feeling the necessity of a salute, he removed his hat, bowed, and, finding a direct approach impossible, shot off obliquely and absurdly.

“I had once a German colleague who was a lavish and indiscriminate patron of the ladies of a certain profession. He resigned. I also have resigned.”

She said:

“I’m sorry,” and, having found her tongue, added:

“Can you tell me the way to the Flat Iron Market. My aunt won’t take me in.”

“Are you also in disgrace?”

“Yes, sir. I was in service. It was the young master. I did love him, I did really.”

“You had been dismissed when I met you in the train?”

“Yes, sir. They gave me a quarter of an hour to go, without wages, and they are sending on my box. My aunt won’t take me in.”

Again in her eyes was the expression of helplessness and impotence in the face of distress that had so moved him, and once again he melted. He forgot his own situation and was only concerned to see that she should not come to harm or be thrown destitute upon a cold, a busy, harsh, and indifferent world. Upon his inquiry as to the state of her purse, she told him she had only a shilling, and he pressed half a sovereign into her hand. Then he asked her why she wished to find the Flat Iron Market, and she informed him she had an uncle, Mr. Copas, who was there. She had only seen him twice, but he had been kind to her mother when she was alive, although he was not respectable.

They were directed by a policeman, and as they walked Beenham gave her the story of his experience at the police station and how he had accepted the Chief Constable’s ultimatum. And he employed the opportunity to complete his explanation of his extraordinary lapse from decorum.

“You can do silly things when you’re half awake,” said Matilda. “It’s like being in love, isn’t it?”

“I have never been in love.”

She shot a quick, darting glance at him and he blinked.

Flat Iron Market is a piece of waste land over against a railway arch. Here on Saturdays and holidays is held a traffic in old metal, cheap laces and trinkets, sweets and patent medicines, and in one corner are set up booths, merry-go-rounds, swing boats, cocoanut shies, and sometimes a penny gaff. In the evening, under the flare and flicker of naphtha lamps, the place is thronged with artisans and their wives and little dirty wizened children, and young men and maidens seeking the excitement of each other’s jostling neighborhood.

Now, as Beenham and Matilda came to it, it was dark and deserted; the wooden houses were shrouded, and the awnings of the little booths and the screens of the cocoanut shies flapped in the night wind. They passed a caravan with a fat woman and two young men sitting on the steps, and they yawped at the sight of Beenham’s white shirtfront.

“Does Mr. Copas live in a caravan?” asked Beenham.

“It’s the theayter,” replied Matilda.

Picking their way over the shafts of carts and empty wooden boxes, they came to a red and gilt fronted building adorned with mirrors and knobs and scrolls, above the portico of which was written: “Copases Theater Royal,” in large swollen letters. At either end of this inscription was a portrait, one of Mrs. Siddons in tragedy, the other of J. L. Toole in comedy. Toole had been only recently painted and had been given bright red hair. Mrs. Siddons, but for her label, would only have been recognizable by her nose.

In front of this erection was a narrow platform, on which stood a small automatic musical machine surmounted with tubular bells played by two little wooden figures, a man and a woman in Tyrolian costume, who moved along a semi-circular cavity. In the middle of the faÇade was an aperture closed in with striped canvas curtains. This aperture was approached from the ground by a flight of wooden steps through the platform.

“Please,” said Beenham, “please give my name as Mr. Mole.”

Matilda nodded and ran up the wooden steps and through the aperture. She called:

“It’s dark.”

When Mr. Mole followed her he found himself standing on the top of another flight of steps leading down into impenetrable gloom. He struck a light and peered into an auditorium of rough benches, the last few rows of which were raised above the rest. Matilda looked up at him, and he was struck by the beauty of the line of her cheek from the brow down into the neck. She smiled and her teeth flashed white. Then the match went out.

He lit another, and they moved toward the stage, through the curtains of which came a smell of onions and cheese, rather offensive on such a hot night. For the first time Beenham began to feel a qualm as to the adventure. The second match went out, and he felt Matilda place her hand on his arm, and she led him toward the stage, told him to duck his head, and they passed through into a narrow space, lit by a light through another curtain, and filled, so far as he could see, with scenery and properties.

“Have you been here before?” he said.

“When I was a little girl. I think it’s this way.”

He stumbled and brought a great pole and a mass of dusty canvas crashing down. At once there was the battering of feet on boards, the din of voices male and female, and above them all a huge booming bass roaring:

“In Hell’s name, what’s that?”

Matilda giggled.

A curtain was torn aside, and the light filled the place where they were. Against it they could see silhouetted the shape of a diminutive man craning forward and peering. He had a great stick in his hand, and he bellowed:

“Come out o’ that! It’s not the first time I’ve leathered a man, and it won’t be the last. This ’ere’s a theater, my theater. It ain’t a doss house. Come out o’ that.”

“It’s me,” said Matilda.

“Gorm, it’s a woman!”

“It’s me, uncle.”

“Eh?”

“It’s me, Matilda Burn.”

“What? Jenny’s girl?”

“Yes, uncle.”

“Well, I never! Who’s your fancy?”

“It’s Mr. Mole.”

The figure turned and vanished, and the curtain swung to again. They heard whisperings and exclamations of surprise, and in a moment Mr. Copas returned with a short ladder which he thrust down into their darkness. They ascended it and found themselves on the stage. Matilda was warmly embraced, while her companion stood shyly by and gazed round him at the shabby scenery and the footlights and the hanging lamps over his head. He found it oddly exciting to be standing in such a place, and he said to himself: “This is the stage,” as in Rome one might stand and say: “This is the Forum.” This excitement and romantic fervor carried with it a certain helplessness, as though he had been plunged into a foreign land that before he had only dimly realized.

“This is the stage! This is the theater!”

It was a strange sensation of being detached and remote, of having passed out of ordinary existence into a region not directly concerned with it and subject to other laws. He felt entirely foreign to it, but then, also, under its influence, he felt foreign to his own existence which had cast him high and dry and ebbed away from him. It was like one of those dreams in which one startlingly leaves the earth and, as startlingly, finds security in the thin air through which, bodiless, one soars. There was something buoyant in the atmosphere, a zestfulness, and at the same time an oppressiveness, against which rather feebly he struggled, while at the same time he wondered whether it came from the place or from the people. Mr. Copas, the large golden-haired lady, the thin, hungry-looking young man, the drabbish young woman, the wrinkled, ruddy, beaming old woman, the loutish giant, the elderly, seedy individual, the little girl with her hair hanging in rat’s tails, who clustered round Matilda and smiled at her and glowered at her and kissed her and fondled her.

To all these personages he was presented as “Mr. Mole.” When at length Mr. Copas and his niece had come to an end of their exchange of family reminiscence, the men shook hands with him and the women bowed and curtsied with varying degrees of ceremony, after which he was bidden to supper and found himself squatting in a circle with them round a disordered collection of plates and dishes, bottles, and enameled iron cups, all set down among papers and costumes and half-finished properties.

“Sit down, Mr. Mole,” said Mr. Copas. “Any friend of any member of my family is my friend. I’m not particular noble in my sentiments, but plain and straightforward. I’m an Englishman, and I say: ‘My country right or wrong.’ I’m a family man and I say: ‘My niece is my niece, right or wrong.’ Them’s my sentiments, and I drink toward you.”

When Mr. Copas spoke there was silence. When he had finished then all the rest spoke at once, as though such moments were too rare to be wasted. Matilda and Mr. Copas engaged in an earnest conversation and the clatter of tongues went on, giving Mr. Mole the opportunity to still his now raging hunger and slake the tormenting thirst that had taken possession of him. Silence came again and he found himself being addressed by Mr. Copas.

“Trouble is trouble, I say, and comes to all of us. For your kindness to my niece, much thanks. She will come along of us and welcome. And if you, being a friend of hers, feel so disposed, you can come along, too. It’s a come-day-go-day kind of life, here to-day and gone to-morrow, but there’s glory in it. It means work and plenty of it, but no one’s ever the worse for that.”

It was a moment or two before Beenham realized that he was being offered a position in the troupe. He took a long draught of beer and looked round at the circle of faces. They were all friendly and smiling, and Matilda’s eyes were dancing with excitement. He met her gaze and she nodded, and he lost all sense of incongruity and said that he would come, adding, in the most courteous and elegant phrasing, that he was deeply sensible of the privilege extended to him, but that he must return to his house that night and set his affairs in order, whereafter he would with the greatest pleasure renounce his old life and enter upon the new. He was doubtful (he said) of his usefulness, but he would do his best and endeavor not to be an encumbrance.

“If you gave me the Lord Mayor of Thrigsby,” said Mr. Copas, “I would turn him, if not into a real actor, at least into something so like one that only myself and one other man in England could tell the difference.”

Mr. Mole found that he had just time to catch the last train home, and, after arranging for his return on the following day, he exchanged courtesies all round, was shown out by a little door at the back of the stage, and walked away through the now empty streets. He was greatly excited and uplifted, and it was not until he reached the incline of the station that memory reasserted itself and brought with it the old habit of prudence, discretion, and common sense. He was able to go far enough back to see the little dusty theater and the queer characters in it as fantastic and antipodean, but when he came to the events of that evening the contrast was blurred and the world of settled habit and conviction was merged into the unfamiliarity of the stage and became one with it in absurdity. The thought of stepping back from his late experience into ordinary existence filled him with anger and hot resentment: the passage from the scene at the club and the interview with his chief to Mr. Copas’s company was an easy and natural transition, or so it seemed when he thought of Matilda.

He felt very defiant when he reached Bigley and half hoped that he might meet some of his acquaintances. They would go on catching the early train in the morning and the through train in the evening, while he would be away and free. Some such feeling he had always had in July of superiority over the commercial men who had but three weeks’ holiday in the year, while he had eight weeks at a stretch. Now he was to go away forever, and Bigley would talk for a little and then forget and go on cluttering about its families and its ailments and its inheritances and its church affairs and its golf course and the squabbles with the Lord of the Manor. He met no one and found his house shut up, and it took him fully half an hour to rouse his man. By that time he had lost his temper and had no desire save to bully the fellow. Everything else was wiped out, and he wanted only to assert himself in bluster. In this way he avoided any awkward wondering whether the man knew, got out the information that he was going away, probably leaving Bigley, selling the house and furniture, and would write further instructions when he had settled down. He ordered and counter-ordered and ordered breakfast until he had fixed it at ten, and at last, after a round volley of oaths because the man turned to him with a question in his eyes, went upstairs to his room, rolled into bed, and slept as deeply as an enchanted knight beneath the castle of a fairy princess.

The next morning he went through his accounts, found that his capital amounted to nearly four thousand pounds, had his large suitcase packed with a careful selection of clothes and books, told his man he was going abroad, paid him three months’ wages in advance, apologized for his violence overnight, shook hands, went round the garden to say good-bye to his vegetable marrows and sweet peas, and then departed.

In Thrigsby he saw his solicitor (an old pupil), who was professionally sympathetic, but took his instructions for the sale of his house and furniture gravely and promised to keep his whereabouts and all communications secret.

“It is a most serious calamity,” said the solicitor.

“Damn it all,” rejoined Old Mole, “I like it.” And he visited his bank. The manager had always thought Beenham “queer,” and received his rather unusual instructions without astonishment.

“You are leaving Thrigsby?”

“For good. Can’t think why I’ve stayed here so long.”

He drew a large sum of money in notes and gold and dined well and expensively at a musty, heavily carpeted commercial hotel. When the porter had placed his bag in a cab and turned for his instructions he gaped in surprise on being told to drive to the Flat Iron Market. Even more surprised were the frequenters of that resort when the cab drew up by the pavement and a well-dressed, middle-aged gentleman with gold spectacles descended and pushed his way through the crowd jostling and chattering under the blare and din of the mechanical organs and the flicker and flare of the naphtha lamps to the back of Copas’s Theater Royal, which he entered by the stage door. It was whispered that he was a detective, and he was followed by a buzzing train of men and women. Disappointed of the looked-for sensation, they soon dispersed and were swallowed up in the shifting crowd.

Groping through the darkness, he came to the greenroom—Mr. Copas’s word for it—and deposited his bag. On the stage, through a canvas curtain, he could hear the thudding of feet and the bellowing of a great voice broken every now and then with cheers at regular intervals and applause from the auditorium. In a corner on a basket sat Matilda. She was wearing a pasteboard crown and gazing at herself in a mirror. As he dropped his bag she looked up and grinned.

“So you’ve come back? I didn’t think you would.”

“Yes, I’ve come back. The school has broken up.”

She removed her crown.

“Like to see the show? Uncle’s got ’em tonight.”

“Got? What has he got?”

“The audience.”

She led him to the front of the house, where they were compelled to stand, for all the benches were full, packed with sweating, zestful men and women who had paid for enjoyment and were receiving it in full measure.

In the “Tales out of School,” published after H. J. Beenham’s death by one of the many pupils who became grateful on his achieving celebrity, there is an admirable account of his first impression of the theater which can only refer to the performance of Mr. Copas in the Flat Iron Market. Till then he says he had always regarded the theater as one of those pleasures without which life would be more tolerable, one of those pleasures to face which it is necessary to eat and drink too much. The two respectable theaters in Thrigsby were maintained by annual pantomimes and kept open from week to week by the visits of companies presenting replicas of alleged successful London plays. He had never attended either theater unless some one else paid. . . . Here now in this ramshackle Theater Royal, half tent, half booth, his sensations were very mixed. At first the shabby scenery, the poverty of the stage furniture, the tawdriness of the costumes of the players, filled him with a pitying sense of the ludicrous. The program was generous, opening with “Robert Macaire,” passing on to “Mary Queen of Scots,” and ending with a farce called “Trouble in the Home,” while between the pieces there would be song and dance by Mr. Fitter, the celebrated comedian. All this was announced on a placard hanging from the proscenium. . . . Mary Queen of Scots was sitting, crowned, on a Windsor chair at the back of the stage, surrounded with three courtiers. As Darnley (or it might be Bothwell), Mr. Copas was delivering himself of an impassioned if halting narration, addressed to the hapless Queen through the audience. He was certainly a very bad actor, so Beenham thought until he had listened to him for nearly five minutes, at the end of which a change took place in his mind and he found himself forced to accept Mr. Copas’s own view of the traffic of the stage. It was impossible to make rhyme or reason of the play, which showed the most superb disregard for history and sense. Apart from Mr. Copas it did not exist. He was its center and its circumference. It began and ended in him, moved through him from its beginning to its end. The rest of the characters were his puppets. When he came to an end of a period Mary Queen of Scots would turn on one of three moods—the tearful, the regal, the noisily defiant; or a page would say, “Me Lord! Me Lord!”; or the lugubrious young man, dressed in priestly black, would borrow from another play and in a sepulchral voice declaim, “Beware the Ides of March.” The performance was an improvisation and in that art only Mr. Copas had any skill, unless he had deliberately so subdued the rest that he was left with his own passionate belief in himself and acting as acting to clothe the naked and deformed skeleton with flesh. Whatever the process of his mind he did succeed in hypnotizing himself and his audience, including Mr. Mole and Matilda, and worked up to a certain height and ended in shocking bathos so suddenly as to create surprise rather than derision. He believed in it all and made everybody else believe.

Matilda gave a sigh as the curtains were drawn and Mr. Copas appeared, bowing and bowing again, using his domination over his audience to squeeze more and more applause out of them.

“Ain’t it lovely?” said Matilda.

“It is certainly remarkable,” replied Mr. Mole.

“You’d never think he had a floating kidney, would you?”

“I would not.”

“It’s that makes him a little quick in his temper.”

From the audience arose a smell of oranges, beer and peppermint, and there were much talk and laughter, giggling and round resounding kissing. No change of scene was considered necessary for the song and dance of Mr. Fitter, who turned out to be the lugubrious young man. He had no humor, but he worked very hard and created some amusement. Mr. Copas did not appear in the farce, which was deplorable and made Mr. Mole feel depressed and ashamed, so that for a moment his old point of view reasserted itself and he felt aghast at the undertaking upon which he was embarked. A moment or two before he had been telling himself that this was “life”—the talk and the laughter and the kissing; now he felt only disgust at its coarseness and commonness. He was dejected and miserable, stripped even of the intellectual interest roused by Mr. Copas. The loutish buffoons on the stage with their brutal humors filled him with resentment at their degradation. Only his obstinacy saved him from yielding to the impulse to escape. . . . Matilda had grown tired of standing and had taken his arm. She laughed at nearly all the jokes. Her laughter was shrill and immoderate. He called himself fool, but he stayed.

He was warmly welcomed by Mr. Copas after the performance. His congratulations and praise were accepted with proper modesty.

“Acting,” said Mr. Copas, “is a nart. There’s some as thinks it’s a trick, like performing dogs, but it’s a nart. What did you think of Mrs. Copas?”

The question was embarrassing. Fortunately no answer was expected.

“I’ve taught her everything she knows. She’s not very good at queens, but her mad scenes can’t be beat, can’t be beat. My line’s tragedy by nature, but a nartist has to be everything. . . . What’s your line, Mr. Mole?”

“I don’t know that I have a line.”

Mr. Copas rubbed his chin.

“Of course. You look like a comic, but we’ll see, we’ll see. You couldn’t write plays, I suppose? Not that there’s much writing to be done when you give three plays a night, and a different program every night. Just the plot’s all we want. Are you good at plots?”

“I’ve read a good deal.”

“Ah! I was never a reader myself. . . . Of course, I can’t pay you anything until I know whether you’re useful or not.”

“I’ve plenty of money, thanks.”

Mr. Copas eyed his guest shrewdly.

“Of course,” he said, “of course, if you were really keen I could take you in as a sort of partner.”

“I don’t know that I——”

“Ten pounds would do it.”

In less than half an hour Mr. Mole was a partner in the Theater Royal and Mr. and Mrs. Copas were drinking his health in Dublin stout. They found him a bed in their lodgings in a surprisingly clean little house in a grimy street, and they sat up half the night discussing plays and acting with practical illustrations. He was fascinated by the frank and childish egoism of the actor and enjoyed firing him with the plots of the Greek tragedies and as many of the Latin comedies as he could remember offhand.

“By Jove!” cried Copas. “You’ll be worth three pounds a week to me. Iffyjenny’s just the part Mrs. Copas has been looking for all her life. Ain’t it, Carrie?”

But Mrs. Copas was asleep.

In the very early morning the Theater Royal was taken to pieces and stacked on a great cart. The company packed themselves in and on a caravan and they set out on their day’s journey of thirty miles to a small town in Staffordshire, in the marketplace of which they were to give a three weeks’ season. Mr. Copas drove the caravan and Mr. Mole sat on the footboard, and as they threaded their way through the long suburbs of Thrigsby he passed many a house where he had been a welcome guest, many a house where he had discussed the future of a boy or an academic problem, or listened to the talk of the handful of cultured men attracted to the place by its school and university. How few they were he had never realized until now. They had seemed important when he was among them, one of them; their work, his work, had seemed paramount, the justification of, the excuse for all the alleged squalor of Thrigsby which he had never explored and had always taken on hearsay. That Thrigsby was huge and mighty he had always admitted, but never before had he had any sense of the remoteness from its existence of himself and his colleagues. It was Thrigsby that had been remote, Thrigsby that was ungrateful and insensible of the benefits heaped upon it. There had always been a sort of triumph in retrieving boys from Thrigsby for culture. He could only think of it now with a bitterness that fogged his judgment. His discovery of the Flat Iron Market made him conceive Thrigsby as a city of raw, crude vitality on which he had for years been engaged in pinning rags and tatters of knowledge in the pathetic belief that he was giving it the boon of education—secondary education. And there frothed and bubbled in his tired mind all the jargon of his old profession. In a sort of waking nightmare he set preposterous questions in interminable examinations and added up lists of marks and averaged them with a sliding rule, and blue-penciled false quantities in Latin verse. . . . And the caravan jogged on. He looked back over the years, and through them there trailed a long monotonous stream of boys, who had taken what he had to give, such as it was, and given nothing in return. He saw his own futile attempts to keep in touch with them and follow their careers. They were not worth following. Nine-tenths of them became clerks in banks and offices, sank into mediocre existences, married, produced more boys. The mockery of it all! He thought of his colleagues, how, if they stayed, they lost keenness and zest. How, if they went, it was to seek security and ease, to marry, to “settle down,” and produce more boys. Over seven hundred boys in the school there were, and all as alike as peas in a pod, all being taught year in, year out, the same things out of the same books by the same men. His thoughts wound slowly round and round and the bitterness in him ate into his soul and numbed him. The caravan jogged on. He cared nothing where he was, whither he might be going, what became of him. Only to be moving was enough, to be moving away from the monotony of boys and the black overpowering vitality of Thrigsby.

It was not easy for Mr. Copas to be silent and he addressed his new partner frequently on all manner of subjects, the weather, the horse’s coat, the history of Mr. Fitter, and all with such absorption that they had gone eight miles and were just passing out of Thrigsby into its southeast spur of little chimney-dominated villages before he awoke to the fact that he was receiving no attention.

“Dotty!” he said, with a click of his tongue, and thereafter he fell to conning new speeches for the favorite parts of his repertory. Slowly they crawled up a long slope until they rounded the shoulder of a low rolling hill, from whence the world seemed to open up before them. Below lay a lake, blue under the vivid sky, gleaming under the green wooded hills that enclosed it. Beyond rose line upon line of round hummocky hills. The caravan stopped and with a jolt Mr. Mole came out of the contemplation of the past when he was known as H. J. Beenham, and sat gaping down at the lake and the hills. He was conscious of an almost painful sense of liberation. The view invited to move on and on, to range over hill after hill to discover what might lie beyond.

“What hills are those?” he asked.

“You might call them the Pennine Range.”

“The backbone of England. That’s a school phrase.”

“You been asleep? Eh?”

“Not exactly asleep. Kind of cramped.”

“You’re a funny bloke. I been a-talking to you and you never listened.”

“Didn’t I? I’m sorry.”

“We water the horses just here.”

There was a spring by the roadside and here the caravan drew up. Mrs. Copas produced victuals and beer. Conversation was desultory.

“Can’t do with them there big towns,” said Mr. Copas, and Old Mole then noticed a peculiarity of the actor’s wife. Whenever he spoke she gazed at him with a rapt stupid expression and the last few words of his sentences were upon her lips almost before they left his. It was fascinating to watch and the schoolmaster forgot the feeling of repugnance with which their methods of eating inspired him. He watched Mrs. Copas and heard her husband, so that every remark was broken up:

“Wouldn’t go near them if it weren’t for the——”

“Money.”

“Give me a bit of cheese and a mug of beer by the——”

“Roadside.”

“But the show’s got to——”

“Earn its keep.”

“Earn its keep. I’m going to sleep. Them as wants to walk on can walk on.”

Mr. Copas rose and went into the caravan and his wife followed him. The wagon had not yet caught them up.

“Shall we walk on?” said Matilda.

“If it’s a straight road.”

“Oh! There’ll be signposts. We’ll maybe find a wood.”

So they walked on. She was wearing a blue print frock with the sleeves rolled up to her elbow. She had very pretty arms.

“I sha’n’t stop ’ere long,” she said.

“No? Why not?”

“It ain’t good enough. Nothing’s good enough if you stop too long at it. Uncle’ll never be any different.”

“Will any of us ever be different?”

“I shall,” she said, and she gave a queer little defiant laugh and her stride lengthened so that she shot a pace or two ahead of him. She turned and laughed at him over her shoulder.

“Come along, slowcoach.”

He grunted and made an effort, but could not catch her. So they moved until they came to a little wood with a white gate in the hedges. Through this she went, he after her, and she flung herself down in the bracken, and lay staring up through the leaves of the trees. He stood looking down at her. It was some time before she broke the silence and said:

“Sit down and smell. Ain’t it good? . . . Do you think if you murdered me now they’d ever find me?”

“What a horrible idea?”

“I often dream I’ve committed a murder. They say it’s lucky. Do you believe in dreams?”

“Napoleon believed in dreams.”

“Who was he?”

“He was born in Corsica, and came to France with about twopence halfpenny in his pocket. He made himself Emperor before he was forty, and died in exile.”

“Still, he’d had his fling. I’m twenty-one. How old are you?”

“Twice that and more.”

“Are you rich or clever or anything like that?”

“No!” he smiled at the question. “Nothing like that.”

She sat up and chewed a long grass stalk.

“I’m lucky.” She gave a little sideways wag of her chin. “I know I’m lucky. If only I’d had some education.”

“That’s not much good to you.”

“It makes you speak prop’ly.”

That was a view of education never before presented to him. Certainly the sort of education he had doled out had done little to amend the speech of his Thrigsbian pupils.

“Is that all you want—to speak properly?”

“Yes. You speak prop-properly.”

“Nothing else.”

“There is a difference between gentlemen and others. I want to have to do with gentlemen.”

“And ladies?”

“Oh! I’ll let the ladies look after theirselves.”

“Themselves.”

“Themselves.”

She flushed at the correction and a dogged sulky expression came into her eyes. She nibbled at the grass stalk until it disappeared into her mouth. For a moment or two she sat plucking at her lower lip with her right finger and thumb. Through her teeth she said:

“I will do it.”

Contemptuously, with admirable precision, she spat out the grass stalk against the trunk of a tree.

“Did you ever see a lady do that? You never did. You’ll see me do things you’ve never seen a lady do. You’ll see me—— But you’ve got to teach me first. You’ll teach me, won’t you? . . . You won’t go away until you’ve taught me? You won’t go away?”

“You’re the most extraordinary young woman I ever met in my life.”

“Did you come to uncle because of me?”

“Eh?”

He stared at her. The idea had not presented itself to him before. She was not going to allow him to escape it.

“Did you come to uncle because of me?”

He knew that it was so.

“Yes,” he said. “Hadn’t we better go?”

“Not yet.”

She was kneeling beside him mischievously tickling the back of his hand with a frond of bracken.

“Not yet. Do you remember what you said to me that night?”

“No. What did I say?”

“You said you’d never been in love.”

“No more I have.”

“Come along then.”

The caravan hove in sight as they reached the gate. She joined Mrs. Copas inside, and he, Mr. Copas, on the footboard. He was filled with a bubbling humor and was hard put to it not to laugh aloud. He had no clear memory of the talk in the wood, but he liked the delicious absurdity of it.

“In love?” he said to himself. “Nonsense.”

All the same he could not away with the fact that he had a new zest and pleasure in contemplating the future. Thrigsby and all its works fell away behind him and he was glad of his promise to teach the girl. . . . One girl after hundreds of boys! It had been one of his stock jests for public dinners in Thrigsby that the masters of the Grammar School and the mistresses of the High School should change places. No one had ever taken him seriously until now Fate had done so. Of course it could not last, this new kind of perambulatory school with one master and one pupil; the girl was too attractive; she would be snapped up at once, settle down as a wife and mother before she knew where she was. In his thoughts he had so isolated himself with her that old prejudices leaped up in him and gave him an uncomfortable sense of indiscretion. That, however, he placated with the reminder that, after all, they were chaperoned by Mrs. Copas.

“That’s a fine girl, your niece,” he said to Mr. Copas.

“Aye. A handsome bit o’ goods. She says to me, she says, ‘I want to be a nactress, uncle,’ she says. And I says: ‘You begin at the bottom, young lady, and maybe when you’re your aunt’s age you’ll be doing the work your aunt does.’ They tell me, Mr. Mole, that in London they have leading ladies in their teens. I’ve never seen the woman who could play leads under forty. . . . Good God! Hi! Carrie! Tildy!”

Mr. Mole had fallen from the footboard, flat on his face in the road.

When he came to himself he thought with a precision and clarity that amounted almost to vision of his first arrival at Oxford, saw himself eagerly, shyly, stepping down from the train and hurrying through the crowd of other young men, eager and shy, and meeting school acquaintances. He remembered with singular acuteness the pang of shame he had felt on encountering Blazering who was going to Magdalen while he himself was a scholar of Lincoln. He pursued the stripling who had been himself out of the station and up past the gaol, feeling amazingly, blissfully youthful when he put up his hand and found a stiff beard upon his chin. Gone was the vision of Oxford, gone the sensation of youth, and he realized that he was in bed in a stranger’s room, which, without his glasses, he could not see distinctly. There was a woman by his bedside, a stout woman, with a strong light behind her, so that he could not distinguish her features. It was a very little room, low in the ceiling. The smell of it was good. It had one small window, which was open, and through it there came up the hubbub of voices and the grinding beat and blare of a mechanical organ that repeated one tune so quickly that it seemed always to be afraid it would not have time to reach the end before it began again. The woman was knitting. He tried to remember who she might be, but failing, and feeling mortified at his failure, he consoled himself with the reflection that he was ill—ill-in-bed, one of the marked degrees of sickness among schoolboys. How ill? He had never been ill in his life.

“Can I have my spectacles?” he said.

“Oh!” The knitting in the woman’s hands went clattering to the floor. “Lor’! Mr. Mole, you did give me a start. I shall have the palpitations, same as my mother. My mother had the palpitations for forty years and then she died of something else.”

II

MARRIAGE

MATILDA kept her promise and made her husband happy. She reduced him to that condition wherein men and women believe that never has the world been visited by such love and that they will go on loving forever and ever. This she achieved by leaving his affections to look after themselves and concentrating all her energies on seeing that he was properly fed and clothed, had the requisite amount of sleep and just enough cosseting to make him wish for more, which he did not get. She left the ordering of their coexistence in his hands, and he, being happy, span a cocoon of charming fancies about it, and showed little disposition to change. Therefore they continued with Mr. Copas and became acquainted with the four quarters of England and the two or three kinds of towns which in vast numbers have grown on it, like warts on the face of Oliver Cromwell. Bemused by the romance of love and the sense of well-being that its gratification brings, he observed very little and thought less, and he did not perceive that he was falling into a routine as dispirited as that in which he had gone round and round out of adolescence into manhood and out of manhood into middle age. Such is the power of love—or rather of a certain very general over-indulged variant of it—that it can lift a man out of space and time and set him drifting and dreaming through a larger portion of his allotted span than he can afford to lose. As there is a sort of peace in this condition, it is highly prized: indeed, it passes for an ideal, being as material as a fatted pig into whose sides you can poke your finger, as into a cushion; it has the further merit that it needs no effort to attain, but only a fall and no struggle. Old Mole fell into it and prized it and told himself that life was very good. When he told his wife that life was very good she said that it was a matter of opinion and it depended what you happened to want.

“What do you want?” he asked.

She thumped her chest with the odd little teasing gesture that was perhaps most characteristic of her, and said:

“Something big.”

“Aren’t you content?”

“Oh, yes. But I want to know, to find out.”

He stretched his legs and, with a beautiful sense of enunciating wisdom, he remarked:

“There is nothing to know, nothing to find out. Here are we, a man and a woman, fulfilling the destiny of men and women, and, for the rest, happy enough in the occupation to which circumstances and our several destinies and characters have brought us. I am perfectly happy, my dear, most surprisingly happy when I look back and consider all things. I have no ambition, no hopes, and, I fancy, no illusions; most happily of all, I have no politics. I did not make the world and I do not believe that I can undo anything good or evil which, for the world’s purposes, is necessary to be done. . . .”

He had developed a habit of talking and did not know it. She had taken refuge in silence and was aware of it.

Once she asked him if he did not feel the want of friends.

“Friends?” he answered. “I want nothing while I have you.”

She made no reply and he was left hurt, because he had expected appreciation of his entire devotion.

She was happy, too, but more keenly than he, for she was a little dazed by her astounding luck, and behind her pleasure in him and his unfailing kindness and consideration lay the sting of uneasiness and the dread that the comfort of such charming days could not last. Ignorant, untaught, unprepared, love had been for her a kiss of the lips, a surrender to the flood of perilous feeling, a tampering with forces that might or might not sweep you to ruin: a matter of fancy, dalliance, and risk. She had fancied, dallied, dared, and when she had thought to be swept to ruin—and that swift descent also had had its sickening fascination—she had been tumbled into this security where love was solid, comfortable, omnipresent, and apparently all providing. She was perpetually amazed at her husband and chafed only against herself because she could not share his complacency. It was easy for her to assimilate his manners and to take the measure of his refinement. With talk of her brothers and sisters she would lead him on to tell of his family, and especially of the women among whom he had spent his boyhood, and she would contrast herself with them and rebel against everything in herself that was not harmonious with their atmosphere. And she found it increasingly difficult to get on with her aunt, Mrs. Copas.

The new comic, John Lomas, was a great success. He was a fat little man in the fifties with a thorough knowledge of his business, which was to make any and every kind of audience laugh. A wonderful stock of tricks he had, tricks of voice, of limbs, of gesture, of facial expression, nothing but tricks, inexhaustible. He cared about nothing in the world but what he called “the laugh,” and when he got one he wanted another, and always had a quip or a leer or a cantrip to get it. But he was a rascal and a drunkard, and had lost all sense of the fitness of things and always went on too long until his audience was weary of him. Therefore he had come down and down until he found an appetite to feed that was gross enough to bear with his insistence. . . . He said—it may have been true—that he had played before the King of England, and he was full of stories of the theaters in London, the real nobby theaters where the swells paid half a guinea for a seat and brought their wives and other people’s wives in shining jewels and dresses cut low back and front. He had played in every kind of piece, from the old-fashioned kind of burlesque to melodrama, drama, and Shakespeare, and he had never had any luck, but had always been on the point of making a fortune. “Charley’s Aunt,” he said, had been offered to him, and he had taken an option, but at the last moment his backers failed him. “And look at the money that had made and was still making.” His first stage of intoxication was melancholy, and then he would weep over the mess he had made of his life and grow maudlin and tell how badly he had treated the dear little woman who had been his wife so that she had left him and gone off with a bloody journalist. When that mood passed he would grow excited and blustering, and brag of the slap-up women he had had when he was making his thirty pounds a week. His most intimate confessions were reserved for Matilda, for he despised Copas because he had never known anything better than a fit-up. And of Mr. Mole he was rather scared.

“I don’t know,” he would say to Matilda. “I don’t know what it is, but your guv’nor ain’t one of us, is he now?”

And when Matilda agreed that Mr. Mole was different he called her a silly cuckoo for not making him take her to London and the Continong to have a high old time.

He could play the piano in a fumbling fashion, and he used to sing through the scores of some of the old pieces he had been in, with reminiscences of the players who had been successful in them and full histories of their ups and downs and their not unblemished lives, all with a full-throated sentimentality that made every tale as he told it romantic and charming. Broken and rejected by it as he was, he worshiped the theater and gloried in it, and the smell of the grease paint was to him as the smell of the field to a Jewish patriarch.

One day he insisted that Matilda should sing, and he taught her one of the old coon songs that had haunted London in the days of his prosperity. At first she was shy and sang only from her throat, and he banged out the accompaniment and drowned her voice and told her that really no one would hear her but the conductor. She must sing so that she could feel as if her voice was a little bigger than herself. The phrase seized her imagination, and she tried again. This time she produced a few full notes and then had no breath left to compass the rest. However, he was satisfied, and said she’d do for the chorus all right.

“And some of those gels, mark you,” he said, “do very well for themselves, in the way of marriage, and out of it.”

He taught her to dance, said she had just the feet for it. “Not real slap-up dancing, of course, but the sort you get in any old London show; the sort that’s good enough with all the rest—and you’ve got that all right, my dear—and not a bit of good without it.”

The development of these small accomplishments gave her a very full pleasure, greater confidence in herself, and a feeling of independence. She took a naÏve and childish pride in her body from which these wonders came. They gave her far keener delight than “the acting” had ever done, but she never connected them with her ambition. They were a purely personal secret treasure, an inmost chamber whither she could retire and let go, and be expansively, irresponsibly herself.

Toward the end of the first year of their marriage, in the harsh months of the close of the year, they were for six weeks in a city that sprawled and tumbled over the huge moors of Yorkshire. It rained almost continuously, and it was very cold, but in that city, which almost less than any other of the industrial purgatories of the kingdom appreciates art and the things of the mind, they prospered. John Lomas got his fill of laughter, and, the kinematograph being no new thing there, the theater weathered that competition.

Matilda wrote to her sister, Mrs. Boothroyd, whose husband was employed at the municipal gasworks, and sent her a pass. She gave her news: how she was married and happy and enjoying her work with her uncle. The Boothroyd family only knew of Matilda’s disaster and nothing of her subsequent history. Mr. Boothroyd, who was a deacon at his chapel, forbade his wife to take any notice of the letter, and she obeyed him, but, when he was on the night shift at the works, she made use of the pass.

The program consisted of Mr. Mole’s “Iphigenia,” and a farce introduced into the repertory by John Lomas from what he could remember of a successful venture at the old Strand Theater in London. Matilda appeared in both pieces. She was so successful that Mrs. Boothroyd, who sat in the front row, swelled with pride, and, as she clapped her hands, turned to her neighbor:

“Isn’t she good? And so pretty, too! Whoever would have thought it? But there always was something about her. She’s my sister, you know.”

“Indeed? Then I am pleased to meet you. She is my wife.”

“Well, I never! . . .”

Mrs. Boothroyd seized Old Mole by the hand and shook it warmly, while she giggled with excitement. She bore a faint resemblance to Matilda, but looked worn, had that pathetic, punctured appearance which comes from overmuch child-bearing. Throughout the rest of the performance she only glanced occasionally at the stage and devoted her attention to scanning her brother-in-law’s appearance. At the close of the second piece she said:

“I am glad. It would never ha’ done for her to ’ave a young ’usband. She was always the flighty one.”

This sounded ominously to Old Mole, who for more than a year now had been young with Matilda’s youth, and so comfortably accustomed to it that he never dared in thought dissever himself from her. He rejoined that his sister-in-law would be glad to know that Matilda was settled down.

They went behind and found her hot and flustered, painted, and half out of the gipsy dress in which she had made her last appearance. When she saw Mrs. Boothroyd she gave a cry of delight, rushed to her and flung her arms round her neck and kissed her.

“Didn’t Jimmy come, too?”

“No; Jimmy was at the works, and couldn’t come.”

Matilda asked after all the Boothroyd children and her own brothers and sisters, and all their illnesses and minor disasters were retailed. Mr. and Mrs. Copas came in and embraced Bertha Boothroyd, whom they had not seen since she was a little girl, and when she said how proud she was of Matilda they replied that she had every reason to be. John Lomas appeared with stout and biscuits, and the occasion was celebrated. Warmed by this conviviality, Mrs. Boothroyd invited them all to tea with her on the next day but one, then, alarmed at the thought of what she had done, gave a little frightened gasp, was pale and silent for a few moments, and at last said she must be home to give Jim his supper when he came back.

She kissed and was kissed. Her disquietude had blown the high spirits of the party. When she had gone Matilda said:

“Jim’s a devil. Bertha’s had a baby every year since she was married, and he thinks of nothing but saving his own soul.”

Next day came a note from Bertha saying she was afraid her little house would not accommodate the whole party, but would Matilda bring her husband. “Is Mr. Mole an actor?” she asked. “I told Jim he wasn’t.”

Bertha’s address was 33 June Street. It was a long journey by tram, and then Matilda and her husband had to walk nearly a mile down a monotonous road intersected with little streets. The name of the road was Pretoria Avenue, and on one side the little streets were called after the months of the year, and on the other after the twelve Apostles. The Boothroyds therefore lived in the very heart of the product of the end of the nineteenth century. Their front door opened straight on to the street, they had a little yard at the back, and their house consisted of eight rooms. The parlor door was unlocked for the visit, and, amid photographs of many Boothroyds, testimonials to the worthiness of James Boothroyd and his Oddfellows’ certificate, tea was laid, none of your proper Yorkshire teas, but afternoon tea with thin bread and butter. Five little Boothroyds in clean collars and pinafores were placed round the room, and stared alternately at the cake on the table and their aunt and their new uncle. Old Mole endeavored to avoid their gaze, but the room seemed full of round staring gray eyes, and when he considered the corpulent American organ that took up the whole wall opposite the fireplace, he was astonished that so many people could be crammed into so small a space. Then he estimated that there were at least sixty other exactly similar houses in the street, that from January to December there were streets in replica, not to mention those on the other side of the road which were named from John to—surely not to Judas? He remembered then that one street was called Paul Street. . . . Dozens and dozens of houses, each with its Boothroyd family and its American organ. Dejectedly he told himself that these were the poor, until, glancing across at Matilda, he remembered that it was from such a house, among dozens of such houses, that she had come. That thought colored his survey, and he reminded himself, as nearly always he was forced to do when considering her actions or any episode in her history, that his own comfortable middle-class standards were not at all proper to the consideration of the phenomena of mean streets. Desperately anxious to make himself pleasant to Matilda’s sister, he asked heavily:

“Are these all——?”

She was in such a flutter that she did not leave him time to finish his sentence, took him to be referring to the children, and said: “Yes, they were all hers, and there were two more in the kitchen.”

With more tact Matilda cut the cake and gave a piece to each of the five children. Mrs. Boothroyd said she was spoiling them, and Matilda retorted:

“If they’re good children you can’t spoil them.”

And the children giggled crumbily and presently they sidled and edged up to their aunt and began to finger her and pluck at her clothes. Seeing his wife so set Old Mole off on an entirely new train of thought and feeling, and he began to contrast the Copas atmosphere with this domestic interior. Very queerly it gave a sort of life to that crusted old formula that had, with so many others, gone by the board in his eruption from secondary education, wherein it was laid down that a woman’s place is her home. He could never, without discomfort, apply any formula to Matilda, but to see her there, with the bloom on her, in her full beauty, with the five little children at her knees, made this idea so attractive that he was loath to relinquish it: nor did he do so until Matilda asked if she might see the house, when she and Mrs. Boothroyd and the five children left him alone with the ruins of the cake and the American organ.

He was profoundly uneasy. He had not exactly idealized the Copas theater and all its doings, but he had come to them on the crest of a violent wave of reaction and had been apt to set them against and above everything in the world that was solid and stolid and workaday. It had been enchanted for him by Matilda, and she had in June Street set an even more potent spell upon him and wafted him not into any kingdom of the imagination, but into the warm heart of life itself. In the Copas world he had made no allowance for children: in June Street, in dull industrial respectability, children were paramount. They surrounded Matilda and set him, in his slow fashion, tingling to the marvel of her. His response to this miracle took the form of a desire to open his pockets to the children. He took out a handful of money, and had selected five shillings when the door opened and a man entered, a dark, white-faced, thin-lipped man, with dirty hands and an aggressive jut of the shoulders.

“Ye’ve been tea-partying, I see,” said the man.

Old Mole explained his identity. The man put his head out of the door and yelled to his wife. She returned with Matilda, but the children did not come. James Boothroyd ignored the visitors to his house and said to his cowering wife:

“You’ll clean up yon litter an’ you’ll lock t’door. What’ll neighbors say of us? I don’t know these folk. You’ll lock t’door and then you’ll gi’ me me tea in t’kitchen.”

There was no sign of anger in the man. He had taken in the situation at a glance and was concerned only to bring it to the issue he desired. His relations by marriage were spotted by a world which he shunned as darkest Hell, and he would have none of them.

With as much dignity as he could muster, Old Mole led his wife out into June Street. He was filled only with pity for Bertha.

Said Matilda: “Didn’t I tell you he was a devil?”

Later in their lodging he asked her:

“Are all the men in those streets like that?”

“If they’re religious, they’re like that. If they’re not religious they’re drunk. If they’re not drunk you never know when they’re going to leave you. That’s the sort of life I came out of and that’s the sort of life I’m never going back into if I can help it.”

“You won’t need to, my dear.”

“You never know.”

With which disquieting assurance he was left to reflect that she seemed to have been as much upset by her visit to June Street as himself. He was tormented by a vision of England, this little isle, the home of heroes and great men, groaning beneath the weight of miles of such streets and sinking under the tread of millions of men like James Boothroyd. Lustily he strove for a cool, intellectual consideration of it all, a point from which the network of the meanish streets of the cities of England could be seen as justifiable, necessary, and unto their own ends sufficient, but, seen from the Copas world, they were repulsive and harsh; viewed through Matilda they were touched with magic.

They were both unsettled and passed through days of irritation when they came perilously near to quarreling. In the end they made it up and found that they had conquered new territory for intimacy. On that territory they discussed their marriage, and he told her that he would like her to have a child. She burst into tears, and confessed that after her calamity the doctor had told her it was very improbable she ever would. He was for so long silent on that, being numbed by the sudden chill at his heart, that she took alarm and came and knelt at his side and implored him to forgive her, and said that if he did not she would go out on to the railway or into the canal. Then he, too, wept, and they held each other close and sobbed out that the world was very, very cruel, but they must be all in all to each other. And he said they would go away and settle down in some pretty place and live quietly and happily together right away from towns and theaters and everything. She shook her head, and, with the tears streaming down her cheeks, she said: No, she did not want to be a lady; at least, not that sort of a lady. He made many suggestions, but always her mind flew ahead of his, and she had constructed some horrid sort of a picture of the existence it would entail. At last he gave it up and said he supposed if there was to be a change it would come of its own accord.

It came.

Mrs. Copas, quite suddenly and for no apparent reason, decided that she was middle-aged, entirely altered her style of dressing and doing her hair, and, as the outward and visible sign of the advent of her maturity, set her heart on a black silk gown. She cajoled and teased and bullied her husband, but in vain. He was replenishing the theatrical wardrobe and could not be led to take any interest in hers. She pursued Mr. Mole with hints and flattery, but he could not or would not see her purpose. He had decided that Matilda should be dressed in a style more befitting his wife than she had adopted heretofore, and was spending many happy and weary hours in the shops patronized by the wives of clerks and well-to-do tradespeople. Incidentally he discovered a great deal about what women wear and its powerful influence over their whole being. In her new clothes Matilda was more dignified, more handsome, more certain of herself, and she gained in grace. . . . Mrs. Copas took to haunting their lodgings and was nearly always there when a new hat or a new jacket came home from the shops. She would insist on Matilda’s trying them on, and would go into loud ecstatic praise and long reminiscences of the fine garments she had had when she was a young woman, and Mr. Copas was the most attentive husband in the world.

An old peacock without its tail is a sorry sight, and the young birds scorn him. Matilda did not exactly scorn her aunt, but her continued presence was an irritant. She was not yet at her ease in the possession of many fine clothes and was entirely set on gaining the mastery of them and of the accession of personality they brought. Mrs. Copas was a clog upon this desire, and therefore when, after many hints and references, she came suddenly to the point and asked pointblank for a loan of four pounds wherewith to buy a black silk gown, Matilda flushed with anger and exasperation and replied curtly that her husband was not made of money.

“No, dearie, I know, but I’d so set my heart on a black silk gown.”

And the towsled old creature looked so pathetic and disappointed that Matilda was on the point of yielding; but indeed she was really alarmed at the amount of money that had been spent—more than twenty pounds—and she followed up her reply with a firm No.

Mrs. Copas took it ill, and set herself to making things unpleasant for Mr. Mole and his wife. She had control of affairs behind scenes and also of the commissariat, and it was not long before she had provoked a quarrel. Matilda told her she was a disagreeable old woman; to which she hit back with:

“Some women don’t care how they get husbands.”

Following on that there was such a sparring and snarling that in the end Mr. Copas declared that his theater was not big enough for the two of them, and that Matilda must either eat her words and beg her aunt’s pardon or go. As the most injurious insults had come from her aunt, Matilda kicked against the injustice of this decree and flounced away. She said nothing to her husband of what had taken place. They were at the beginning of December, and already the hoardings of the town were covered with announcements of the approaching annual pantomime at the principal theater, together with the names of the distinguished artistes engaged. Matilda dressed herself in her very smartest and for the first time donned the musquash toque, tippet and muff she had been given. They were the first furs she had ever possessed, and she felt so grand in them that she was shy of wearing them. When she had walked along several streets and seen herself in a shop window or two, they gave her courage for her purpose, and she told herself that she was, after all, as good as anyone else who might be wanting to do the work, set her chin in the air, went to the theater, and asked to see the manager. The doorkeeper had instructions not to turn away anything that looked promising and only to reject those who looked more than thirty-five and obviously had no chance of looking pretty even behind the footlights. He did not reject Matilda. She was shown into the manager’s presence, stated her wishes and accomplishments and experience. The manager did not invite her either to sing or to dance, but asked her if she minded what she wore. She had seen pantomimes in Thrigsby, and she said she did not mind.

“All right, my dear,” said the manager, who was good looking, young, but pale and weary in expression. And Matilda found herself engaged for the chorus at one pound a week.

She told Lomas first, and he was delighted. When it came to her husband she found it rather difficult to tell him, was half afraid that he would forbid her to pursue the adventure, and half ashamed, after his great kindness, of having acted without consulting him. However, she was determined to go on with it and to uproot him from the Copas theater. She began by telling him of her quarrel with her aunt.

“I thought that was bound to happen,” he said.

“Yes. It came to that that uncle said I must go. What do you think I’ve done?”

“Bought a new dress?”

“No. Better than that.”

“Made friends with the Lord Mayor?”

“Funny! No.”

“What have you done, then?”

“I’ve got an engagement at the theater, the real, big theater where they have a proper stage, and a stage door and a box office, and a manager who wears evening dress.”

“Indeed? And for how long?”

“It may be for ten weeks and it may be for thirteen. It was fifteen last year.”

“And what am I to do?”

She had not thought about him and was nonplussed. However, he needed very little cajoling before he gave his consent to her plan, and she told him that if he got bored he could easily go away by himself and come back when he wasn’t bored any longer. Inwardly he felt that the difficulty was not going to be so easily settled as all that, but he was on the whole relieved to be rid of Mr. Copas, who had arranged to move on as soon as the pantomime opened to the distraction of the public and the devastation of his business. When Mr. Mole announced his intention of remaining the actor was affronted and refused to speak to him again. Matilda said, a little maliciously, that he was afraid of being asked for the money he owed them, and that was her parting shot after Mrs. Copas, who got her own back with the loud sneer in Mr. Mole’s presence:

“There’s not many married women would wear tights and not many husbands would let ’em.”

Old Mole gasped, and looked forward with dread to the first performance of the pantomime. He was spared the indignity of tights, for the fifty women in the chorus were divided into “girls” and “boys,” in accordance with their size, and Matilda was a “girl.” She took her work very seriously, put far more energy into it than she had ever done into “Iphigenia” or “Josephine.” The theater, one of the largest in England, awed her by the size of its machinery, and she was excited and impressed by all the talk and gossip she heard of the doings of the theaters and the halls. She disliked most of her colleagues in the chorus, and of the principals only one was not too exalted to take notice of her. This was a young actor named, professionally, Carlton Timmis (pronounced Timms), who played the Demon King. He was very attentive and kind to her, and when she asked if she might introduce him to her husband he was obviously dismayed, but expressed himself as delighted. He was a rather beautiful young man and very romantic, and he and Old Mole found much to talk of together.

“You can’t think,” said Timmis, “what a relief it is to meet a man with a soul. Among all those idiots one is parched, withered, dried up.”

And much the same thought was in Old Mole’s mind. Looking back he was astonished that he could for so long have tolerated the unintelligent society in which he had been cast. Timmis had decided, if erratic, opinions, and he loved nothing better than gloomily to grope after philosophical conceptions. Being very young and unsuccessful, he was pessimistic and clutched eagerly at everything which encouraged him in his belief in a world blindly responding to some mysterious law of destruction. Old Mole was inclined toward optimistic Deism and materialism, and they struck sparks out of each other, Timmis moving in a whirl of nebulous ideas, and his interlocutor moving so slowly that, by contrast, he seemed almost rigid.

“Take myself,” Timmis would say. “Can there be any sense in a world which condemns me to play the Demon King in an idiotic pantomime, or indeed in a world which demands, indulges, encourages, delights in such driveling nonsense as that same pantomime?”

“There is room for everything in the world, which is very large,” replied Old Mole.

“Then why are men starved, physically, morally and spiritually?”

“The universe,” came the reply, between two long puffs of a cigar, “was not made for man, but man was made for the universe.”

(This was an impromptu, but Old Mole often recurred to it, and indeed declared that his philosophy dated from that day and that utterance.)

“But why was the universe made?”

“Certainly not from human motives and not in terms of human understanding. To hear you talk one would think the whole creation was in a state of decomposition.”

“So it is. That is its motive force, an irresistible rotting away into nothing. I don’t believe anything but decomposition could produce that pantomime.”

“The pantomime is so small a thing that I think it impossible for it to be visibly affected by any universal process. It is simply a human contrivance for the amusement of human beings, and you must admit that it succeeds in its purpose.”

“It has no purpose. It succeeds in spite of its stupidity by sheer force of the amiable cleverness of an overpaid buffoon and the charm and physical attractions of two or three young women.”

Old Mole was forced to admit the justice of this criticism, and to drive it home Timmis recited the eight lines with which in the cave scene he introduced the ballet:

Matilda had been listening to them, and she said:

“Doesn’t she look lovely when she comes on all in white? Such a pretty voice she has, too.”

“You like the pantomime, my dear?”

“Oh, yes!”

“Could you say why?”

“It’s pretty and gay, and it’s wonderful to hear the people in that great big place laughing and singing the choruses.”

“You see, Timmis, the pantomime has justified its existence.”

“But what on earth has it got to do with Sinbad?”

“Nothing. Why should it? Sinbad is an Eastern tale. The pantomime is an English institution. It reflects the English character. It is heavy, solid, gross, over-colored, disconnected, illogical and unimaginative. On the other hand, it is humorous, discreetly sensual, varied and full of physical activity. It affords plenty to listen to and nothing to hear, plenty to look at and nothing to see, and it is like one of those Christmas puddings which quickly make the body feel overfed and provide it with no food.”

“Anyhow,” said Matilda, “it’s a great success, and they say it will run until after Easter.”

It did so: the tunes in it were whistled and sung in the streets, the comedians’ gags became catchwords, the principal buffoon kicked off at a charity football match, and, upon inquiry, Old Mole found that clerks, schoolboys and students visited the theater once a week, and that among the young sparks of the town, sons of mill-owners and ironmasters, there was considerable competition for the favors of the chorus ladies. Some of these phenomena he remembered having observed in Thrigsby, and at least one of his old pupils had come to grief through a lady of the chorus and been expelled by his affrighted family to the Colonies. By the end of the fifth week he was thoroughly sick of it all, and he began to agree with Timmis that the success of the show was very far from justifying it. It was so completely lacking in character as to be demoralizing. His third visit left him clogged and thick-witted, as though he had been breathing stale air. It was a poison: and if it were so for him, what (he asked himself) must it be for young minds and spirits? . . . And yet Matilda throve in it. She liked the work and she now liked the company, who, being prosperous, were amiable, and they liked her. Most of all, she loved the independence, the passage from the solid, safe, warmly tender atmosphere with which her husband surrounded her to the heat, the rush and the excitement of the theater. When he left her at the stage door she would give a shrug of the shoulders that was almost a shake, give him a swift parting smile that he always felt might have been given to a stranger, and with a quick gladness dart through into the lighted passage. . . . Before many weeks had passed she had letters, flowers, presents, from unknown admirers. He asked Timmis if there was any harm in them, and the actor replied that it was the usual thing, that women had to look after themselves in the theater, and that these attentions pleased the management. They pleased Matilda: she laughed at the letters, decorated their rooms with the flowers, and left the presents with the stage doorkeeper, who annexed them. Old Mole definitely decided that he disliked the whole business and began to think enviously of James Boothroyd, who was religious and a devil, but did at least have his own way in his own house. To achieve that the first thing necessary was to have a house, and he half resolved to return to his old profession—not considering himself to be fit for any other. But he never rounded the resolution and he never broached his thoughts to Matilda. He told himself that by Easter it would be all over and they would go away, perhaps abroad, see the world. . . . Then he realized that apart from Matilda he had no desires whatever, that his affections were entirely engaged in her, and that, further, he was spasmodically whirled off his feet in a desire that was altogether independent of his will, obedient only to some profound logic either of his own character or of the world outside him, to mark and consider the ways of men. Rather painfully he was aware of being detached from himself, and sometimes in the street, in a tram, he would pull himself up with a start and say to himself:

“I don’t seem to be caring what happens to me. I seem to be altogether indifferent to whatever I am doing, to have no sort of purpose, while all these men and women round me are moving on with very definite aims.”

Deliberately he made the acquaintance of men teaching in the little university of the place and in its grammar school. He saw himself in them. He could talk their language, but whereas to them their terms were precise and important, to him they were nothing but jargon. . . . No: into that squirrel cage he would not go again. They seemed happy enough and pleased with themselves, but, whereas he could enter fully into their minds, the new regions that he had conquered for himself were closed to them. They complained, as he had done in Thrigsby, of the materialism of their city, and in moments of enthusiasm talked of the great things they could do for the younger generation, the future citizens of the Empire, if only some of the oozing wealth of the manufacturers could be diverted to their uses. But the city had its own life, and they were no more a part of it than he had been of Thrigsby. . . . When they had cured him of his discontent he was done with them, and took refuge in books. He bought in a great store of them and fumbled about in them for the threads of philosophy he was seeking. He procured stimulation, but very little satisfaction, and he was driven to the streets and the public places. Very secret was the life of that city. Its trades were innumerable. Everything was manufactured in it from steel to custard powder. It owed its existence to the neighboring coalfields, its organization to a single family of bankers whose interests were everywhere, in almost every trade, in the land, in the houses, in the factories, in the supply of water and lighting, and everywhere their interests were trebly safeguarded. The city lived only for the creation of wealth and by it. With the distribution of wealth and the uses it was put to it had no concern; nor had its citizens time to consider them. Their whole energies were absorbed in keeping their place in the markets of the world, and they were too exhausted for real pleasure or domestic happiness. When Old Mole considered the life of that city by and large, James Boothroyd appeared to him as its perfect type. And yet he retained his optimism, telling himself that all this furious energy was going to the forging of the city of the future.

“The bees,” he said, “build the combs in their hives, the ants the galleries in their hills, and men their sprawling cities, and to everything under the sun there is a purpose. Let me not make the mistake of judging the whole—which I cannot see—by the part.”

He had reached this amiable conclusion when Carlton Timmis entered his room, sat down by the table and laid a bulky quarto envelope on it. He was agitated, declined the proffered cigar, and broke at once into the following remarkable oration:

“Mr. Mole, you are one of the few men I have ever met who can do nothing with dignity and without degradation. Therefore I have come to you in my distress to make a somewhat remarkable request. And it is due to you and to myself to make some explanation.”

He seemed so much in earnest, almost hysterical, and his great eyes were blazing with such a fervor that Old Mole could not but listen.

“My real name,” said Timmis, “is Cuthbert Jones. My father is a small shopkeeper in Leicestershire. He is a man, so far as I can discover, devoid of feeling, but with a taste for literature and—God knows why, at this time of day!—the philosophy of the Edinburgh school. He had a cruel sense of humor and he made my mother very unhappy. He encouraged me to read, to write, to think, to be pleased with my own thoughts. It amused him, I fancy, to see me blown out with my own conceit, so that he might have the pleasure of pricking my bladder-head and then distending it again. For weeks together I would have his praise, and then nothing but the most bitter gibes. I had either to cling to my conceit to keep my head above water or sink into the depths of misery and self-distrust. I devoured the lives of illustrious men and attributed their fame to those qualities in them which I was able to find in myself. I sought solitude, avoided companions of my own age, and I was always desperately, wretchedly in love with some one or other. I really believed myself to be a genius, or rather I used to count over my symptoms and decide one day that I was, the next that I was not. All this roused my father to such a malicious delight, and with his teasing he made my life so intolerable that at last I could stand it no longer, and I ran away. I walked to London, and then, after applying in vain for work at the newspaper offices, I obtained a situation in a theater as a call boy. I could not possibly live on what I earned, and should have been in a bad way but for a kind creature, a dresser, who lodged me in her house, took my wages in return, and allowed me pocket money and money for my clothes. I wrote to my father and received an extraordinary letter in which he applauded my action and expressed his belief that nothing could prevent a man of genius from coming to the top. ‘It is as impossible to keep a bad man up as to keep a good man down,’ he said. I have neither gone down nor up, Mr. Mole. As I have grown older I have slipped into one precarious employment after another. No one pays any attention to me, no one, except yourself, has ever troubled to discover my thoughts on any subject, and often, when I have been inclined to think myself the most miserable of men, I have found correction in the memory of my boyish belief in my genius. . . . Such changes of fortune as I have had have come to me through women. All the kindness I ever received came through them, and every disaster that has crushed me has arisen through my inability to stop myself from falling in love with them. . . . You will understand what I mean when I talk of the life of the mind. That life has always been with me, and it has perhaps been my only real life. I have had great adventures in it. I have aimed and wrestled and struggled toward a goal that has many times seemed to me immediately attainable.”

He paused and brushed back his hair, and his eyes set into an expression of extraordinary wistful longing and into his voice came a sweetness most musical and moving.

“There is, I believe, a condition within the reach of all men wherein the selfish self is shed, the barrier broken down between a man and his vision and purpose, so that his whole force can be concentrated upon his object and his every deed and every thought becomes an act of love. I have many a time come within reach of this condition, but always just when I seemed most sure I have toppled over head and ears in love with some woman, whom in a very short space of time I despised and detested. When I met you I was uplifted and exalted and come nearer to my goal than ever before, and now, more fatuously, more idiotically than ever, I am in love. . . . I give it up. I am forced to the conclusion that I am one of those unhappy beings who are condemned to live between one state and the other, to be neither a slave bent on eating, drinking, sleeping and the grosser pleasures, nor a free man satisfying his every lust and every desire, by the way, only the more sturdily and mightily to go marching on with the great army of friends, lovers and comrades. . . . In short, Mr. Mole, I am done for.”

“Well, well.” Old Mole was aware of the entire inadequacy of this either as comment or as consolation, but he was baffled by the self-absorption which had gone to the making of this elaborate analysis: and yet he had been stirred by the Demon King’s vision of the possibilities of human nature and roused by the words “every deed and every thought an act of love.” There was a platonic golden idealism about it that lifted him back into his own youth, his own always comfortable dreams, and, contrasting himself with Timmis (or Jones), he saw how immune his early years had been from suffering. Timmis might be done for, but if anyone was to blame it was his malicious, erratic father. Then, with his mind taking a wide sweep, he saw that there could be no question of blame or of attaching it, since that father had also had a father who perhaps suffered from something worse than Edinburgh philosophy. There could be no question of blame. The world was so constructed that Timmis (or Jones) was bound to be out of luck and to fail, just as it seemed to be in the order of creation that he himself, H. J. Beenham, should be comfortable and beyond the reach of the cares most common to mankind. There were fat kine and lean kine, and, come what may, the lean kine would still light upon the meager pasture.

There be fat men and lean men, but men have this advantage over kine, that they can understand and help each other.

So Old Mole nursed his knee and told himself that Timmis was obviously sincere in believing himself to be done for, and therefore for all practical purposes he was done for, and there was no other useful course to pursue than to listen to what further he might have to say, and then, from his point of view, to consider the position and see if there were not something he had overlooked in his excited despair.

Timmis concluded his tale, and nothing had escaped him. His own opinion of his moral condition must be accepted: as to his material state, that could not possibly be worse. He had loved, wooed and won a lady in the chorus upon whom the manager had cast a favorable eye and the light of his patronage. There had been a scene, an altercation, almost blows. Timmis’s engagement ceased on the spot, and, as he said, he now understood why actors put up with so much insult, insolence and browbeating on the part of their managers. He had three shillings in his pocket with which to pay his rent and face the world, and he was filled with disgust of women, of the theater, of himself, and would Mr. Mole be so kind as to lend him fifty pounds with which to make a new start in a new country; he believed that in fresh surroundings, thousands of miles away from any philosophy or poetry, or so-called art, he could descend to a lower level of existence, and perhaps, without the intervention of another disastrous love affair, redeem his false start. He was not, he said, asking for something for nothing—no man born and bred in England could ever bring himself to ask for or to expect that!—he was prepared to give security of a sort which only a man of intelligence and knowledge of affairs would accept. He had brought a play with him in typescript. It was called “Lossie Loses.” In his time Timmis had written many plays, and they were all worthless except this one. Most of them were good in intention but bad in performance: he had burned them. This was bad in intention but good in execution, and one of these days it would become a considerable property. An agent in London had a copy, he said, and he would write to this man and tell him that he had transferred all his rights to Mr. Mole. He then produced a pompous little agreement assigning his property and stating the consideration, wrote his name on it with a large flourishing hand, and passed it over with the play to his friend in need. After a moment’s hesitation, during which he squashed his desire to improve the occasion with a few general remarks, Old Mole thought of the unlucky creature’s three shillings and of the deliverance that fifty pounds would be to him, and at once produced his checkbook and wrote out a check.

No man has yet discovered the art of taking a check gracefully. Timmis shuffled it into his pocket, hemmed and ha’d for a few seconds, and then bolted.

Old Mole took up his play and began to read it. It did not interest him, but he could not put it down. There was not a true emotion in it, not a reasonable man or woman, but it was full of surprising tricks and turns and quiddities, was perpetually slopping over from sugary tenderness to shy laughter, and all the false emotions in it were introduced so irrelevantly as never to be thoroughly cloying, and indeed sometimes to give almost that sensation of delighted surprise which comes truly only from the purest and happiest art. Not until it was some moments out of his hands did Old Mole recognize the thing in all its horrid spuriousness. Then he flung it from him, scowled at it, fumed over it, and finally put it away and resolved to think no more about it or of Carlton Timmis.

That night when he met Matilda she was in high delight. The “second girl” was ill; her understudy had been called away to the sick bed of her only surviving aunt, and she had been chosen to play the part at a matinÉe to see if she could do it. Her name would not be on the program, but she would have ten lines to speak and one verse in a quartet to sing, and a dance with the third comedian. Wasn’t it splendid? And couldn’t they go and have supper at the new hotel just to celebrate it? All the girls were talking about the hotel, and she had never been to a real restaurant.

It is hard not to feel generous when you have given away fifty pounds, and Old Mole yielded. They had oysters and grilled kidneys, and they drank champagne. Matilda had never tasted it before and she made a little ceremony of it. It was so pretty (she said), such a lovely color, and the bubbles were so funnily busy. He drank too much of it and became amorous. Matilda was wonderfully pretty and amusing in her excitement, and he could not take his eyes off her.

“Tell me,” he said, “do you really like this life?”

“I love it. It’s something like what I’ve always wanted to be. In some ways it’s better and some ways it’s worse.”

“I don’t see much of you now.”

“You like me all the better when you do see me.”

“We’re not getting on much with your education.”

“Education be blowed.”

He was distressed and wished she had not said “be blowed.” She saw his discomfort and leaned forward and patted his hand.

“Don’t you fret, my dear. There’s a good time coming.”

But unaccountably he was depressed. He was feeling sorry he had brought her. There was a vulgarity, a sensuousness in the glitter and gilt of the restaurant that sorted ill with what in his heart he felt and was proud to feel for Matilda. He was sorry that she liked it, but saw, too, that she could not help but be pleased since to her it was all novel and dazzling. Hardest of all to bear, he was forced to admit that he had no immediate alternative to lay before her.

They drove home in a taxi, and she caressed him and soothed him and told him he was the dearest, kindest, gentlest and most considering husband any girl could have the luck to find. And once again, ominously, he was struck by the strangeness of the word husband on her lips. For a short while he was haunted by the figure of Timmis, with his disgust of women even while he loved one of them. But he shook away from that and told himself that if there was something lacking in his relations with his wife the fault must lie with him, for he at least had a certain scale of spiritual values, while she had none, nor, from her upbringing, could she have had the opportunity of discovering any in herself or her relations with those about her.

She said he thought too much, but without thought, without passionate endeavor, how could marriage fail to sink into brutish habit? Was that too fastidious? Since there is an animal element in human life, were it not as well to deal with it frankly and healthily on an animal level? That offended his logic. There could be no element in life that was not harmonious with every other element. The gross indulgence of sex had always been offensive to him, a stupid protraction of the heated imprisonment of adolescence, a calamity that must result in arrested development. Marriage had forced him to think about these things, and he was determined, so far as in him lay, to think about them clearly, without dragging in literature, or sentiment, or prejudice. In marriage, admittedly, lay the highest spiritual relationship known, or ever to be known, to human beings. In marriage, obviously, the body had its share. If the body’s share were regarded as separate from the rest, as an unfortunate but not unpleasant necessity, then, being separate, how could it be anything but a clog upon the full and true union? It was impossible for him to think of sex as a clot in the otherwise free mating of souls, and, indeed, his experience assured him that the exercise of his sex gave him not only the most wonderful deliverance from physical obsessions, but also from the uneasy and unprofitable brooding of the mind.

But he was uneasy and anxious in his marriage, came to believe that it was because his wife was content with so little when he desired to give her so much more, and blamed himself for his apparent inability to set forth his gift of emotion and human fellowship in terms that she could understand.

He went to see her play her part in the pantomime and suffered agonies of nervousness for her. She delivered her ten lines without mishap, sang her part in the quartet inaudibly, and her dance in the duet was applauded so loudly that at last the conductor tapped his little desk, and Matilda came tripping forth again with her comedian, bowed, kissed her hand, and went through the movements—absurd, banal, pointless as they were—with a shy grace and a breathless, childish pleasure that were charming. He was swept into the collective pleasure of the audience and clapped his hands with them and felt that the Matilda there on the stage was not his Matilda, but a creature belonging to another world, of whose existence he was aware, while nothing in his world could have any influence or any bearing on her whatsoever. . . . He would meet her at the stagedoor, and she would be his Matilda, while the other remained behind, as it were, inanimate in her charmed existence. Both were infused with life from the same source of life; the essence passed from one to the other, and therefore there was not one Matilda but three Matildas.

He lost himself in this mystic conception and was timely rescued by her meeting him as he passed through the vestibule. She took his arm and hugged it and asked him if he liked it.

“Wasn’t it good getting an encore? That dance has only been encored six times before.”

He told her how nervous he had been.

“I wasn’t a bit nervous once I was on, but in the wings it was awful.”

She said she wanted to take him behind the scenes so that he could see what a real theater was like. They passed through the stagedoor and along narrow, dusty passages, up steep flights of stone stairs, she chatting gaily in spite of the frequent notices enjoining silence, and every now and then they were stopped and Matilda was embraced by male and female alike, and all the women said how glad they were, and the men said: “good egg” or “top hole.” Suddenly out of the narrow, dusty ways they came upon the stage, huge and eerie. There was only a faint light, the curtain was up, and there were tiny women in the auditorium dropping white cloths from the galleries and shrouding all the seats. Never had Old Mole had such a sense of emptiness and desolation. A man’s voice came from far up above the stage, and it sounded like a thin ghostly mocking. There was a creaking and a rasping, and a great sheet of painted canvas descended, the wings were set in place, and a flight of stairs was wheeled up and clamped: the scene was set for the opening of the pantomime. Suddenly the lights were turned on. Matilda began to hum the opening bars of the overture. Old Mole blinked. He was nearly blinded. The colors in the scenery glowed in the light. He had the most alarming sense of being cut off from his surroundings, of being projected, thrust forward toward the mysterious, empty auditorium with its shrouded seats and the little women bustling up and down in it. Almost irresistibly he was impelled to shout to them, to engage their attention, to make them look at him. His mind eased and a thrill of importance ran through him: never had he seemed to himself to bulk so large. He was almost frightened: the immense power of the machinery, the lighted stage and the darkened auditorium alarmed and weighed crushingly upon him.

“It’s like a vault,” said Matilda, “with no one in front. But when it’s full, on a Saturday night, hundreds and hundreds of faces, it’s wonderful.”

To him it was not at all like a vault, but like an engine disconnected from its power. The mind abhors a vacuum, and he was striving to fill the emptiness all about him, thronging the auditorium with imaginary people, and struggling to occupy the magic area of light in which he stood. In vain: he was impotent. He felt trapped.

“Let us go,” he said.

On the stairs they met the manager.

“Hullo, Tilly,” he said. “You’re a good girl.”

“Thanks.”

Old Mole hated the young man, for he was common and loose in manner and in no way worthy of the enchanted Matilda or of the marvelous organism, the theater, in which she seemed to live so easily and freely.

His thoughts were much too confused for him to impart them to her, and he was vastly relieved when they left the theater and she became his Matilda.

That night he read to her. He had been delighting in “Lucretius,” and he had marked passages, and he turned to that beginning:

“Iam iam non domus accipiet te lÆta, neque uxor Optima. . . .”

He translated for her:

“ ‘Now no more shall a glad home and a true wife welcome thee, nor darling children race to snatch thy first kisses and touch thy heart with a sweet silent content; no more mayest thou be prosperous in thy doings and a defence to thine own; alas and woe!’ say they, ‘one disastrous day has taken all these prizes of thy life away from thee’—but thereat they do not add this, ‘and now no more does any longing for these things assail thee.’ This did their thought but clearly see and their speech follow they would deliver themselves from much burning of the heart and dread. ‘Thou, indeed, as thou art sunk in the sleep of death, wilt so be for the rest of the ages, severed from all weariness and pain.’ . . .

“Yet again, were the nature of things to utter a voice and thus with her own lips upbraid one of us, ‘What ails thee, O mortal, that thou fallest into such vain lamentation? Why weep and wail at death? For has thy past life and overspent been sweet to thee, and not all the good thereof, as though poured into a cracked pitcher, has run through and perished without joy, why dost thou not retire like a banqueter filled with life, and, calmly, O fool, take thy sleep? But if all thou hast had is perished and spilled and thy life is hateful, why seekest thou yet to add more which shall once again all perish and fall joylessly away? Why not rather make an end of life and labor? For there is nothing more that I can contrive and invent for thy delight; all things are the same forever. Even were thy body not yet withered, nor thy limbs weary and worn, yet all things remain the same, didst thou live on through all the generations. Nay, even wert thou never doomed to die’—what is our answer?”

“Don’t you believe in God?” asked Matilda.

It came like a question from a child, and he had the adult’s difficulty in answering it, the doubt as to the interpretation that will be put upon his reply.

“I believe,” he said slowly, “in the life everlasting, but my life has a beginning and an end.”

“And you don’t think you go to Heaven or Hell when you’re—when you’re dead?”

“Into the ground,” he said.

Matilda shivered, and she looked crushed and miserable.

“Why did you read that to me?” she said at last. “I was so happy before. . . . I’ve always had a feeling that you weren’t like ordinary people.”

And she seemed to wait for him to say something, but his mind harped only on the words: “For there is nothing more that I can contrive and invent for thy delight,” and he said nothing. She rose wearily and took her hat and coat and the musquash collar that had been her pride, and left him.

For hours he sat over the fire, brooding, flashing occasionally into clear logical sequences of thought, but for the most part browsing and drowsing, turning over in his mind women and marriage and the theater and genius, the authentic voice of the nature of things, the spirit of the universe that sweeps into a man’s brain and heart and burns away all the thoughts of his own small life and fills him with a music that rings out and resounds and echoes and falls for the most part upon deaf ears or upon ears filled only with the clatter of the marketplace or the sweet whisperings of secret, treacherous desires. And he thought of the engines in that city, day and night, ceaselessly humming and throbbing, weaving stuffs and forging tools and weapons for the clothing and feeding of the bodies of men: the terrifying ingenuity of it all, the force and the skill, the ceaseless division and subdivision of labor, the multiplication of processes, the ever-increasing variety of possessions and outward shows and material things. But through all the changes in the activities of men, behind all their new combinations of forces “all things are the same forever and ever. . . .” He remembered then that he had hurt Matilda, that she had resented his not being “like ordinary people,” resented, that is, his acceptance of the unchanging order of things, his refusal to confuse surface change with the mighty ebb and flow of life. It was, he divined, that she had never reached up to any large idea and had never conceived of any life, individual or general, outside her own. To her, then, the life everlasting must mean her life, and he regretted having used that phrase. She was concerned, then, entirely with her own existence—(and with his in so far as it overlapped hers)—and life to her was either “fun” or something unthinkable. . . . . It seemed to him that he was near understanding her, and he loved her more than ever, and a rare warmth flooded his thoughts and they took on a life of their own, were bodied forth, and in a sort of ecstasy, thrilling and triumphant, he had the illusion of being lifted out of himself, of soaring and roaming free and with a power altogether new to him, a power whereof he was both creator and creature, he saw out of his own circumscribed area of life into another life that was no replica of this, but yet was of the same order, smaller, neater, trimmer, concentrated, and distilled. There was brilliant color in it and light and shade sharply distinct, and everything in it—houses, trees, mountains, hills, clouds—was rounded and precise: there was movement in it, but all ordered and purposeful. The sun shone, and round the corner there was a selection of moons, full, half, new, and crescent, and both sun and moon could be put away so that there should be darkness. As for stars, there were as many as he chose to sprinkle on the sky. . . . At first he could only gaze at this world in wonder. It sailed before him in a series of the most dignified evolutions, displaying all its treasures to him; mountains bowed and clouds curtseyed, and Eastern cities came drifting into view, and ships and islands; and there were palaces and the gardens of philosophers, sea beaches whereon maidens sang and mermaids combed their hair; and there were great staircases up and down which moved stately personages in silence, so that it was clear there was some great ceremony toward, but before he could discover the meaning of it all the world moved on and displayed another aspect of its seemingly endless variety. And he was sated with it and asked for it to stop, and at last with a mighty effort he became more its creator than its creature, and, as though he had just remembered the Open Sesame, it stayed in its course. It stayed, and in a narrow, dark street, with one flickering light in it, and the brilliant light of a great boulevard at the end of it, he saw an old white-bearded man with a pack on his back and a staff in his hand. And the old man knew that he was there, and he beckoned to him to come into the street. So he went and followed him, and without a word they turned through a little dark gateway and across up a courtyard and up into a garret, and the old man gave him a sack to sit on and lifted his packet from his back and out of it built up a little open box, and hung a curtain before it. Old Mole settled on his sack and opened his lips to speak to the old man, but he had disappeared.

The curtain rose.

III

INTERLUDE

BY a roadside, at the end of a village, beneath the effigy of a god, sat a lean, brown old man. He had no covering for his head and the skin of the soles of his feet was thickened and scarred. In front of him were two little boxes, and on his knees there lay open a great book from which he was reading aloud in an unknown tongue.

From the village there came a young man, richly clad and gay, attended by two slaves. He saluted the effigy of the god and asked the old man what he might be reading. The old man replied that it was the oldest book in the world and the truest, and when he was questioned about the boxes he said that one of them contained riches and the other power. The young man looked into them and saw nothing. He laughed and spoke to one of his slaves, saying the old and the poor must have their fancies since there was nothing else for them, and, upon his orders, the slave filled the boxes with rice, and at once there sprung up two mighty trees. The slaves fled howling and the young man abased himself before the effigy of the god and stole away on his knees, praying. The old man raised his hands in thanksgiving for the shade of the trees, lifted them out of the boxes, and once more arranged them before him.

In the wood hard by arose the sound of high words and out upon the road, brawling and storming, tumbled two youths, comely and tall and strong. They stopped before the old man and appealed to him.

“Our father,” said he who first found breath, “is a poor man of this village, and I am Peter and my brother is Simon. Two days ago, on a journey, we saw the picture of the loveliest maiden in the world. We do not know her name, but we are both determined to marry her, and there is no other desire left in us. We have fought and wrestled and swum for her, but can reach no conclusion. I will not yield and he will not yield. Is all our life to be spent in wrangling?”

The old man closed his book and replied:

“The loveliest maiden in the world is Elizabeth, daughter of the greatest of emperors. If you are the sons of poor men how can you ever hope to lift eyes to her? Look now into these boxes and you shall be raised to a height by which you shall see the Emperor’s daughter and not be hidden in the dust of her chariot.”

They looked into the boxes, and Simon saw in the one a piece of gold, but Peter looked as well into the other, and in it he saw the face of his beloved princess and had no thought of all else. Simon asked for the first box and Peter for the second, and they received them and went their ways, Simon to the village and Peter out into the world, each gazing fascinated into his box.

“To him who desireth little, little is given,” said the old man. “And to him who desireth much, much is given; but to neither according to the letter of his desire.”

By the time he reached his village Simon had five gold pieces in his pocket, and as soon as he took one piece from the box another came in its place. He lent money to every one in the village at a large rate of interest and was soon the master of it. There began to be talk of him in the town ten leagues away and there came men to ask him for money. He moved to the town and built himself a big house, and it was not long before he began to look to the capital of the country.

When he moved to the capital he had six houses in different parts of the country, racehorses, picture galleries, mines, factories, newspapers, and he headed the list of subscribers to the hospitals patronized by the Royal Family. At first, in the great city, he was diffident and shy among the illustrious personages with whom he fraternized, but it was not long before he discovered that they were just as susceptible to the pinch of money as the carpenter and the priest and the bailiff and the fruiterer in his village. It was quite easy to buy the control of these important people without their ever having to face the unpleasant fact. More than one beautiful lady, among them a duchess and a prima donna of surpassing loveliness, endeavored to cajole him and to discover his secret. In vain; he could not forget the Princess Elizabeth, and now ambition spurred him on. He was wearying of the ease with which fame and position and the highest society could be bought, and began to lust for power. With his native peasant shrewdness he saw that society consisted of the People, of persons of talent and cunning above them, of the descendants of persons of talent and cunning left high and dry beyond the reach of want, of ornamental families set at the head of the nations, of a few ingenious minds who (so far as there was any direction) governed the workings and interlockings of all the parts of the whole. They had control of all the sources of money except his box, and he determined, to relieve his boredom and also as a means of reaching his Princess, to pit his power against theirs.

He was never ashamed of his mother, and she came to stay with him once a year for a week, but she never ceased to lament the loss of her other son, Peter, from whom no word had come. One night she had a dream, and she dreamed she saw Peter lying wounded in a thicket, and she knew perfectly where it was and said she must go to find him. Simon humored her and gave her money for a long voyage. She went back to her own village and out upon the road until she came to the effigy of the god, for this was the only god she knew, and she prayed to him. The old man appeared before her and told her to go to her home, for Peter would return to her before she died. At this she was comforted, and went home to her husband and sent Simon back his money, because she was afraid to keep so large a sum in the house.

It was said in the capital that the land of the greatest of emperors was the richest of all countries, but the people were the stupidest and had no notion of its wealth. The financiers were continually sending concessionaires and adventurers, but they came away empty-handed. Simon had now paid his way into the royal circle, and for defraying the debt on the royal stable had been ennobled. He suggested to the King that he should send an embassy to invite the greatest of emperors and his daughter to pay a visit to the capital to see the wonders of their civilization.

The embassy was sent, the invitation accepted, and the Emperor and the Princess arrived and their photographs were in all the illustrated papers. They did not like this, for in their own country only one portrait of the Emperor was painted, and that was the life work of the greatest artist of the time. The Princess was candor itself, and said frankly what she liked and what she did not like. She liked very little, and after she had been driven through the capital she sent for the richest man in the country, and Simon was brought to her. He bowed before her and trembled and told her that all his wealth was at her service. So she told him to pull down all the ugly houses and the dark streets and to make gardens and cottages and to give every man in them a piece of gold.

“They will only squander it,” said Simon.

“Let them,” replied the Princess Elizabeth. “Surely even the most miserable may have one moment of pleasure.”

“In your country are there no poor?”

“There are no rich men. There are good men and bad men, and the good are rewarded, and honored.”

As she ordered, so it was done, and the poor blessed the Princess Elizabeth, but the financiers muttered among themselves, and they arranged that one of their agents should go to the Emperor’s country, stir up sedition, and be arrested. Then they announced in their newspapers international complications, said day after day that the national honor was besmirched, and demanded redress. The Emperor and the Princess Elizabeth hurriedly left the capital and returned to their own country. Simon had declared his admiration for the Princess and she had snubbed him. His newspapers added to the outcry, and he ordered a poet to write a national song, which became very popular:

But in the Emperor’s country all the songs were in praise of the Princess Elizabeth, and when she heard that ships of war were on the seas and huge vessels transporting soldiers, she consulted with the Minister and gave orders for all weapons to be buried and for all houses to be prepared to receive the guests and the great hall of the palace to be made ready for a banquet.

Her Minister was Peter, and she delighted in his wisdom and never wearied of listening to the tale of his adventures, how in his quest he had been cheated, and robbed, and beaten, and cast into prison, and scourged, and bastinadoed, and incarcerated for a lunatic, and mocked and despised, nearly drowned by a mountain torrent, all but crushed by a huge boulder that came crashing down a hillside and carried away the tree beneath which he was sleeping; and how all these afflictions did but intensify his vision of that which he loved, so that the pain and the terror of them fell away and he was left with the glorious certainty of being near his goal. He did not tell her what that was because it was very sweet to serve her, and he knew that she was proud and had rejected the hands of the greatest and handsomest princes of her father’s dependencies. It was very pleasant for him to see her emotion as he told his tale, and when she almost wept on the final adventure, how, as he neared her father’s city, he was set upon by a band of peasants, who believed him to be a blasphemer and a wizard because of his box, and left for dead, and how he awoke to find her bending over him, then he could scarcely contain himself, and he would hide his face and hasten from her presence.

He had a little house in one of her private parks, and whenever she was in any difficulty she came to consult him, for his sufferings had made him sensible, and his devotion to a single idea gave him a nobility which she found not in her other courtiers.

It was he, then, who advised the cordial reception of the hostile armies, for he had observed, in the numerous assaults of which he had been the victim, that when he hit back he only incensed his adversary and roused him to a madder pitch of cruelty. Also he had lived among soldiers and knew them to be slaves of their bellies and no true servants of any cause or idea. Therefore, he gave this counsel, and it was followed, and the army was disbanded, and the citizens prepared their houses and decorated the city against the coming of the army. When they arrived, all the populace turned out to see them, and the generals and captains were met by the chief men, the poets, and the philosophers, and the scholars, and made welcome. There were feasting and fireworks, and the harlots devoted themselves to the service of the country, and by night a more drunken army was never seen. Their guns and ammunition were thrown into the harbor, and next day they were allowed to choose whether they would return to their own country or stay and become citizens of this. Nine-tenths of the soldiers chose to stay, many of them married and made honest women of the devoted creatures who had been their pleasure, and thus the causes of virtue and peace were served at once. The soldiers and their wives were scattered up and down the country, work was found for them, and both lost the rudeness and brutality induced by their former callings.

The other tenth returned to their own country. Simon and the financiers heard their galling story and told the people that a glorious victory had been won and the nation’s flag, after horrible carnage, planted over yet another outpost of the Empire. There was immense enthusiasm. Shiploads of Bibles were sent out, and a hundred missionaries from the sixty-five different religious denominations.

Peter’s advice was sought, and he ordered a cellar to be prepared. The Bibles were stored in this, and the missionaries were set to translate them back into the original languages. They had got no further than the twentieth chapter of Genesis when they declared their willingness to be converted to the religion of the country; but there was no professed religion, for, when the Princess had asked Peter what her father could best do to serve his subjects and make his name blessed among them, he had replied:

“Let him abolish that which most engenders hypocrisy. Let him establish the right of every man to be himself. Let there be good men and bad men—since there must be good and bad—but no hypocrites. Let him withdraw his support from that religion which maintains priests, superstition and prejudice, and it will topple down. Faith is an act of living, not a creed.”

At first the Emperor was afraid that if the State religion toppled he would come crashing down, but he could deny his daughter nothing, and he withdrew his support. In less than a year there was not a sign of the professed religion, and no one noticed its absence. There was a marked improvement in the behavior of the people and their good sense, which made it possible for Peter’s advice to be followed in dealing with the foreign army. There was a notable decrease in crime, and litigation became so infrequent that half the Courts of Justice were closed, and the Attorneys and Advocates retired into the country or adopted the profession of letters. With the money released by the disestablished religion and the reduced Courts of Justice the Emperor founded universities and schools and set apart money to endow maternity and medicine, saying: “We have all money enough for our pleasure, but it is when the shadow of a natural crisis comes over us that we are in need.”

The Princess was loud in praise of her Minister, and the people and the men of letters declared that the Emperor really was the greatest ruler the world had ever seen. The Emperor swallowed it all as a good monarch should, but Peter was overcome with tenderness for his Princess, and, dreading lest he should betray his secret, he asked her leave to depart for a while, and betook him to his own country and his village to see his mother.

She lay upon her deathbed and was very feeble. Simon had sent her some calf’s-foot jelly, but was too deeply engaged to come. Peter sat by her bedside and told her about his Princess, and she patted his hand and laughed merrily, and said:

“You always were a bonny liar, laddie. Kiss me and take my blessing.”

Peter kissed her and took her blessing, and she died.

He went to the roadside where he had come by his box and his vision, but the old man was not there, the trees were cut down, and the effigy of the god had rotted away and only the stump of it was left. He planted an acorn in the place to mark the beginning of his joy in life, but, knowing that the act of breathing is prayer enough, he decided to go away and think no more about his good fortune or his bad fortune, or the profit he had drawn from both. He sighed over the thousands of miles that separated him from his Princess, and decided each day to reduce them by at least thirty.

The news of the war had only just reached that part of the country, and he heard men talking of the glorious victory. At first he was alarmed, but when he heard more he laughed and told the men the truth. They took and ducked him in the horse pond for a spy and a traitor, and when he crawled out they thrashed him with whips until they had cut his clothes in ribbons and his flesh into weals. Then they put him in the old stocks and left him there for a day and a night. He was cold and hungry, and his bones ached, but when he found himself near to counting his miseries and wishing himself dead, then he took out his box and gazed at the image of the Princess and said to it:

“Yet will I live to serve you. My life is nothing except it go to sustain the wonder of yours.”

So he bore this calamity, as he had borne so many others, for her sake.

He had no other clothes, and when he was released he patched and mended his suit and made his way, working and singing for his bread, to the capital. There he inquired after his brother, and men looked awed as they pronounced his name, and they all knew his house and the names of his racehorses, but of the rest they could tell very little. Peter went to the magnificent house, ragged as he was, and asked to see his brother. Two lackeys and a butler opened the door, and they lifted their noses at him. The butler said his lordship had brothers and fathers and cousins coming to see him all day long, but Peter persisted, and was told he might be his lordship’s brother, but his lordship was away on his lordship’s yacht and no letters were forwarded.

Having no other interest in the capital, Peter set out on his return, and when he came to the frontier of the fortunate land that had nursed his Princess he was greeted with tidings that made his heart sink within him. A handsome stranger told him that the Emperor had enclosed the commons and great tracts of forest, and prospected the whole country for coal and oil and metals and precious stones, and how the poets and the philosophers and the scholars were cast down from their high places, and, most lamentable of all, how the Princess was imprisoned because she would not marry the new Emperor of Colombia, who had arrived in his yacht with untold treasures, and how her private parks were taken for menageries, racecourses and football grounds. Peter buried his head in his arms and wept.

With the stranger he journeyed toward the capital. Over great tracts of the country there hung black clouds of smoke; new cities meanly built, hastily and without design, floundered out over the hills and meadows; pleasant streams were fouled; sometimes all the trees and the grass and plants and hedgerow bushes were dead for miles; and in those places the men and women were wan and listless and their poverty was terrible to see: there were tall chimneys even in the most lovely valleys, and in them were working pregnant women and little children, and Peter asked the stranger whose need was satisfied by their work.

“There are millions of men upon the earth,” answered the stranger, “and what you see is industrial development. It drives men to a frenzy so that they know not what they do.”

And when they came to the capital they found the frenzy at its height. It was no longer the peaceful and lovely city of Peter’s happiness; gone were the gardens and groves of myrtle and sweet-scented laurel; gone the beautiful houses and the noble streets; tall buildings of a bastard architecture, of no character or tradition, towered and made darkness; huge hotels invited to luxury and lewdness; the Emperor’s ancient palace was gone, and its successor was like another hotel, and in the avenue, where formerly the most gracious and distinguished of the citizens used to make parade amid the admiration and applause of their humble fellows, was now a throng of foreigners and vulgarians, Jews, Levantines, Americans, all ostentation and display. . . . Beneath the splendor and glitter linked a squalor and a sordid misery that called aloud, and called in vain, for pity. And in the outskirts were again the chimneys and the factories with the machines thudding night and day, and round them filth and poverty and disease. . . . The priests were back in their place to give consolation to the poor, who were beyond consolation, and the Courts of Justice were housed in the largest building in the world. At every street corner newspapers were sold.

In a new thoroughfare driven boldly through the most ancient part of the city and flanked absurdly with common terraces of houses, they found a thin crowd standing in expectation. The two Emperors were to go by on their way to open the new Technical College and Public Library. They passed swiftly in an open carriage, and a faint little cheer went up, so different from the vast roar that used to greet the Emperor and the Princess in all their public appearances. The Emperor looked haggard and nervous, as though he were consumed with a fever, but the Emperor of Colombia was fat as a successful spider. Peter gasped when he saw him, for he was Simon. But he said nothing, and they passed on.

Saddest sight of all were the prosperous, well-fed women gazing with dead eyes into the shop windows wherein were displayed fashionable garments and trinkets, overwhelming in their quantity.

Preferable to that was the avenue with the Jews and the Levantines and the Americans. Thither with the stranger Peter returned, and he met a poet, lean and disconsolate, who had been his intimate friend. They three talked together, and the poet asked if there were no power to cool the heat and reduce the frenzy in the blood of the inhabitants of the country. Said the stranger:

“There is a power which makes the earth a heaven; a power without which the life of men is no more than the life of tadpoles squirming in a stagnant pond.”

Peter said the power must be Love: the poet declared it was Imagination.

“Love in itself,” said the stranger, “is a human, comfortable thing; with the light of imagination, love is the living word of God in the heart of man.”

And behold the stranger stood before them, an angel or genius clad all in white with wings of silver that rose above him and beat to flight, and away he soared to the sun. And the poet raised his head, and in a loud voice declaimed musical words, and Peter sobbed in his joy, but the Jews and the Levantines and the Americans had seen nothing, and wearily they drove and walked along the avenue, scanning each other in sly envy.

Hard and bitter was the lot of the people, and their loyalty to the Emperor was shaken. There were none now to bless his name, none to call him the greatest of rulers, and only the priests praised him for his wisdom in yielding to the tide of progress. There was little happiness anywhere: the old superstitions and prejudices were restored to currency, the tyranny of public opinion was enthroned again, and books were written and plays performed to fortify its authority.

Every day Simon sent the Princess richer presents and messengers to crave the boon of an audience; but the Princess made no reply and would never leave her apartments. Every day she used to stand at her window and gaze in the direction where Peter’s country lay and pray for his return. One day her ape was with her, and he chattered excitedly and hurled himself into the sycamore tree that grew beneath her window. He returned in a moment with an empty box. She looked into it and saw the image of Peter, as he was, ragged and unhappy, but with adoration in his eyes. Then she could no longer dissemble, but, with happy tears, she confessed to herself that she loved him. . . . Next day she walked in her garden, and on the other side of the little stream marking its boundary she saw Peter. They told their love, and he swore to deliver her and not to see her again until he had done so. With a brave heart she wished him Godspeed and threw him back his box, in which she had concealed three kisses and a lock of her hair.

For forty days and forty nights did Peter remain in solitude, wrestling with himself and cogitating how he might best accomplish the salvation of his adored Princess and the country that was dearer to her even than himself. Step by step he followed Simon’s career from the time when he had chosen the box with the piece of gold to the golden ruin he had brought upon thousands of men. Then he resolved to send his own box to his brother; nay, himself to take it. He procured gorgeous apparel, and immense chests, and camels and horses and elephants, disguised a hundred and fifty of his friends in Eastern apparel, and in this array presented himself at the Summer Palace, where his brother was lodged. The doors were opened to him, and he was passed on from lackey to lackey until he found himself in his brother’s presence. Simon greeted him cordially and asked for his news, and how he had fared.

“I have all my desires,” said Peter. “I have fulfilled my destiny, and I am come to give you my box. It has served me well.”

Greedily Simon snatched the box and opened it to see what treasure it might contain. He saw no image of beauty therein, but only himself, and the vision of his own soul crushed by the weight of his possessions, and the pride died in him and all the savage lusts to gratify which he had plotted and schemed and laid waste, and he groaned:

“All my power is but vanity and my hopes are in the dust. I am become a monster and unworthy of the Princess Elizabeth.”

His words rang through the Palace, and his servants and those who had called themselves his friends fell upon his possessions and divided them and fled from the country. So deserted, he embraced Peter and vowed that his brother’s love was now a greater treasure to him than all he had sought in his folly. They took counsel together and decided that they had best persuade the greatest of emperors to grant his people a Parliament so as to avert the imminent revolution. They did that, but it was too late. Peter’s procession through the streets to the Summer Palace had alarmed the people with the dread of another Imperial visitor as injurious as the last, and they had made barricades in the streets, and sacked the great hotels, and dragged the Emperor and all his counsellors and courtiers into the stews and there slaughtered them. The Princess Elizabeth was released and loyally acclaimed, and it was only on her intercession that Peter and Simon were spared. She granted the people a Parliament, and the Courts of Justice were taken for its House, and she opened and prorogued it in the regal manner.

After a year of mourning, during which the wisest of laws were framed for the control of the mines and the factories and all the sources of wealth, and land and water were made all men’s and no man’s property, and the children were trained to believe in the revealed religion of love as the living word of God in the heart of man, then the Princess announced her marriage with her Minister and adviser, Peter, the son of a poor man, and they lived happily with their people, and all men loved and praised Peter, and Peter praised and worshiped the Princess Elizabeth. They lived to a ripe old age, gathering blessings as they went, and they had sixteen children.

But Simon returned to his own country and his village, taking with him the two boxes. Out of the one he never took another piece of gold, and into the other he never looked until he was at peace with himself and knew that he could gaze upon his soul undismayed. When he looked into it he saw Peter and the Princess and their children, for all his love was with them. Then he went out upon the road, and beneath an enormous oak tree he found the lean, brown old man with his great book on his knees, reading aloud. He laid the boxes at his feet and bowed to him and said:

“It is well.”

The old man bowed, and, turning a page in his book, he read:

“It is well with the world. Man frets his peace in his little hour on this earth, whereof he is and whereto he returns; but it is well with the world.”

The curtain fell. The little theater disappeared, and all that he had seen and heard in it buzzed in Old Mole’s head, and the colors whirled and a flood of emotion surged through his body, and the spell of it all was upon him. He shifted uneasily upon the sack on which he was seated, and there came a rent in it. Inside it was a corpse, and, when he peered at it in horror, he knew that it was himself.

The enchantment broke, and, shivering and very cold, he fell back into the world of familiar things, the room in the lodging house, with the fire out, and above his head, in the first floor front, lay Matilda, sleeping. He went up to her, and she lay with her hair back over her pillow and her hand under her cheek, and he said:

“I will live to serve you. For my life is nothing except it go to sustain the wonder of yours.”

Old Mole was much astonished at this effort of his imagination, and later on wrote and rewrote it many times, but what he wrote was no more than the pale echo of what he had heard, the faded copy of what he had seen. When he came to analyze and diagnose his condition he concluded that the vivid impressions produced on his unexercised receptive mind had induced a kind of self-hypnotism in which he had been delivered up to the power of dreams subject peculiarly to the direction of his logical faculty. He could not remember having eaten anything that would account for it.

As feverishly and feather-headedly as a boy he skimmed upon the air to post this letter, and as he slipped it into the box he kissed the envelope, and as he did so he was overcome by a sense of the delicious absurdity of his love, of all love, and he bowed low and gravely to the Opera House and said:

“You are a pimple on the face of the earth, my friend, but my love is the blood of its veins.”

He packed his bag before he went to bed, was up very early in the morning, and, as soon as a certain shop in the Rue de la Paix was opened, went in and bought a necklace of crystals and emeralds. He was in London by six o’clock and half an hour later in the northern express. He reached Blackpool before his letter. The company and Matilda were gone. It was Sunday. The theater was closed and he had lost his card of the tour. Watts did not know. He never knew anything. Companies came and went and he stayed, as he said with his weak, watery smile, “right there,” only thankful that their damnable tunes were gone with them. Old Mole cursed him for an idiot and hunted up the stage doorkeeper, whose son was callboy and knew everything. He routed them out of bed, got the information he needed, and was off again as fast as a cross-country train could carry him.

He broke in on Matilda as she was at breakfast, rushed at her boisterously. Through the long hours in the crawling train, with the dawn creeping gray, opal, ripe strawberry, over moors and craggy hills, he had contrived the scene, played a game of Consequences with himself, what he said to her and what she said to him, but Matilda peered at him and in a dull, husky voice said:

“Oh! It’s you.”

And fatuously he stood there and said:

“Yes.”

She was pale and weary and there were deep marks under her eyes. She said:

“You didn’t leave me any money. It was important. We got here last night and then they told us there’d be no last week’s salary. They didn’t pay us on Friday. We traveled on Sunday as usual, and when we got here they told us. Some one in London’s done something. Enid”—that was the name of the knitting woman—“Enid looked awful when they told us, quite ill. I went home with her, and I’ve been up with her all night. She didn’t sleep a wink, but went on counting and counting out loud, like she used to do to herself in the train. . . . I’ve been up with her all night, but it wasn’t any good, because in the morning, when the dawn came, she got up and walked about and went into the next room, and when I went after her she was dead. And if I’d only had a little money. . . . She was a good woman and the only friend I had, and she killed herself.”

He sat by her side and took her hand and soothed her.

“But, my dear child, you had plenty of money of your own in the bank, and your own checkbook.”

“I didn’t know I was to spend that. It was in the bank. You never told me what to do with the book.”

And to find something to say, to draw her thoughts off the miserable tragedy, he explained to her the mysteries of banking, how, when you have more money than you can spend—she had never had it and found that hard to grasp—you pay it into your account and it is entered into a book, and how, if it is a great deal more than you can spend, you lend it to the bank and they pay you interest for it and lend it to other people. She began to grasp it at last and to see that the money was really hers and she would be putting no injury nor affront upon the bank by asking for some of it by means of a check. Then she said:

“Have we a lot of money in the bank?”

“Not an enormous quantity, but enough to go on without selling out.”

“What does that mean?”

He tried to explain the meaning of investments, of stocks and shares, but that was beyond her capacity and her immediate interest. She had begun to think practically of her money, and she said:

“Some of these people have nothing at all.”

And she made him show her how to write a check, and they hunted up all the poorer members of the company—those who had any money were already gone in search of work—and she gave them all enough to pay their rent and for their journey to their homes. Then she wrote to Enid’s husband and gave him all sorts of messages that had not been entrusted to her, said that thirty-five shillings had been found in Enid’s purse and sent that amount to him.

They stayed for the inquest, and Enid’s husband came. He said what a good wife she had been to him, and what cruel times they had been through together, and how he couldn’t believe it, and it wasn’t like her to do such a thing, and she would have been another Florence St. John if she hadn’t married him, and he hadn’t got the name of a Jonah. “S’elp me God!” he said, “she was the right stuff on and off the stage, and them as hasn’t had cruel times and been a Jonah won’t ever understand what she’s been to me.” Through his incoherence there shone a beauty of dumb, humble and trusting love that now triumphed over death as it had triumphed over the monotonous, degrading slips and deprivations of life. Before it Old Mole bowed his head and felt a sort of envy, a regret that he, too, had not had cruel times and been a Jonah.

Clumsily he tried to tell Matilda how he felt, but she could hardly bear to talk of Enid and closed every reference to her with:

“If I had known I could have saved her. I ought to have known.”

Even worse was it when he gave her the necklace.

From the scene of the disaster they had moved to a little fishing village on the Yorkshire coast where they lodged in the cottage of a widow named Storm, perched halfway up a cliff, and from the windows they could see right over the North Sea, smooth as glass, with the herring fleet dotted like flies on its gleaming surface. Here, he thought, they could overcome their difficulties and relax the tension brought about by that last dark experience. There would be health in the wide sea and the huge cliffs and the moorland air. But it was the first time Matilda had been out of the crowd, and the peace and the emptiness induced brooding in her.

When he gave her the necklace she took it out of its white satin and velvet case and fingered it and let the light play on it. Then it seemed to frighten her, and she asked how much it had cost. He told her.

“It seems a sin,” said she, and put it back in its case.

That night she received his letter and then only she seemed to understand why he had given her the necklace, and she came and patted his shoulder and kissed the top of his head. She began to talk of Enid, how she never complained and never said an unkind word of anybody, and how proud she was of two little trinkets, a brooch and a bangle, given her by her husband, which she said she had never pawned and never would.

“The world seems upside down,” said Matilda.

“No. No,” he protested. “It is all as it should be, as it must be. My dear child, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I hurt you, made things hard for you. I was seeing the world all wrong. Men and women seemed only toys. . . .”

“But Enid used to say, you can’t expect anything from people when they have to think of money all day long.”

“When did she say that?”

“When her husband was out so long and didn’t write to her.”

“Did she love him very much?”

“Yes.”

“And I love you.”

“Yes. But. . . . It’s so different.”

He looked at her and she met his gaze. In her eyes there was a strength, a determination, a depth that were new to her. It stimulated him, braced him, and he felt that something was awakened in her, something that demanded of him, demanded, insisted. He was ashamed of his letter, ashamed that he had given her the necklace, ashamed that when she demanded of him the glory of life he had thought no higher than to give her pleasure.

So he was flung back into torment, and where before he saw humanity and its infinite variety as smaller than himself, now, with full swing to the opposite pole of exaggeration, he saw it as immeasurably larger and superior, full of a mighty purpose, ebbing and flowing like the sea, while, perched above the fringe of it, he cowered.

He concealed his distress from her. He was not so far gone but he could delight in the scents and sounds of the country, and he would tramp away over the moors or along the cliffs by himself, lie in the heather and smoke and watch the clouds, real, full-bellied clouds, lumbering and far off shedding a gray gauze of rain. He would fill his lungs with the keen air and return home hungry to sup on plain cottage fare or delicious herrings fresh from the sea.

One night, to please him, Matilda wore the necklace. It was pathetically out of place on her cheap little blouse, incongruous in their surroundings, the stiff, crowded fisherman’s parlor.

It was that decided him. There must be an end of drifting. Sink or swim, they must endeavor to take their place in the world. They would go to London. If among the third-rate mummers who had been their company for so long Matilda could so wonderfully grow and expand, what might she not, would she not, do among gentler, riper souls? And, for himself, he would seek out a task. There must be in England men of active minds and keen imaginations, men among whom he could find, if not the answers to, at least an interest in, the questions that came leaping in upon him. They would go to London and make a home, and Matilda should be the mistress of it. She should live her own life, and he his, and there would be an end of the strain between them, and the beginnings of the most fruitful comradeship.

Once again the immediate execution of his plans was frustrated. A strike was declared on the railways of Great Britain, and it became impossible for them to move, for they were on a branch line. Letters and newspapers were brought nine miles by road and there was no lack of food. The newspapers for a week devoted four columns to the story of the strike, then three columns, then two, then one. A little war broke out in the Persian Gulf. That dominated the strike, which lasted three weeks, and ended in the intervention of the Government, with neither the companies nor the men yielding.

The village had its Socialists, the postman and the fish buyer, and, in the beginning of it, they talked excitedly of a general strike; the dockers would come out and the carters; every port would be closed, transport at a standstill; the miners would lay down their tools, and such frightful losses would be inflicted on the capitalists that they would be unable to pursue their undertakings. They would be taken out of their hands and worked by the laborers for the laborers, and then there would be the beginnings of justice upon the earth and the laborers would begin to enjoy the good things of the world. Old Mole asked them what they meant by the good things of the world, and the answer was strangely Hebraic—a land flowing with milk and honey, where men labored for six days (eight hours a day) and rested the seventh day, and had time to talk and think. They set an enormous value on talking and thinking, and all their enthusiasm was for “settling questions.” The land would be “settled,” and education, and housing, and insurance, and consumption, and lead poisoning. Each “question” was separated from every other; each existed apart from everything else, and each had its nostrum, the prescription for which was deferred until the destruction of the capitalists, and the liberation of the middle classes from their own middle classishness—(for these Socialists detested the middle classes even more than the capitalists)—had placed the ingredients in their hands. The “questions” had to be settled; the capitalists had created them, the middle classes, like sheep, accepted them; the “questions” had to be settled once for all, and therefore the capitalists had to be ruined and the middle classes squeezed in their pockets and stomachs until they surrendered and accepted the new ordering of the world in justice, brotherhood, and equality. Already the strike was doing damage at the rate of hundreds and thousands a week, and they had caught the bulk of the middle classes in their holidays, and thousands of them would be unable to get back to their work.

In the thick of it Old Mole, to satisfy himself, walked over to that town which is advertised as the Queen of Watering Places. There were thousands of the middle classes on the sands. Their children were sprawling on sand castles and dabbling in the thin washings of the sea. Fathers and mothers were lounging in deck chairs, sleeping under handkerchiefs and hats and umbrellas; grandmothers were squatting in charge of their grandchildren. Some of them were reading about the strike in the newspapers. At teatime the beach was cleared as though all human beings had been blown from it by a sea breeze. An hour later it was thickly thronged and the pierrots in their little open-air theater were playing to an enormous audience. The strike had prolonged their holiday; they were prepared to go on in its monotony instead of in the monotony of their work and domestic life. They were quite contented, dully acceptant. There were no trains? Very well, then; they would wait until there were trains. Respectable, well-behaved, orderly, genteel people do not starve. . . . And they were right.

However, it set Old Mole thinking about his own means, the independence which he owed to no virtue nor talent, nor thrift of his own, but to a system which he did not understand, to sources which in the intricacies of their journey to himself were impossible to follow. Of the many enterprises all over the world, in the profits of which he had his share, he knew nothing at all. The reports that were sent to him were too boring or too technical to read. The postman and the fish buyer assured him that he was living upon the underpaid and overtaxed labors of thousands of unhappy men and women. He had no reason for disbelieving them, but, on the whole, his sympathies were with the middle-classes, his attitude theirs; that respectable, well-behaved, orderly, genteel people do not starve. Not that he classed himself with them; he disliked the memory of his colleagues at Thrigsby, of the men at the golf club at Bigley more than anything, and at this time he was not moderate in his dislikes. He warmed to the enthusiasm of the Socialists, but was exasperated by the manner in which, after having made a clean sweep of everything except themselves and their kind, they could produce no constructive idea, but only a thin cerebral fluid, done up in different colored bottles as in a pharmacy. Just at the point when he found himself beginning to dream of a world of decent, kindly, human beings delivered (as far as possible) from their own folly and the tyrannies bred from it, they left humanity altogether and gloated hectically over their “questions.”

If that were Socialism, he would have none of it; he preferred money. He told them so, and found that he had uttered the most appalling blasphemy. They said that Socialism was a religion, the religion that would save the world.

Said Old Mole:

“There have been Hebraism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Christianity, the worship of Isis and Osiris, the worship of the Bull, the Cat, the Snake, the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the Phallus; there have been prophets without number and martyrs more than I can say, saints for every day in the year and more, and none of them has saved the world. More than that, I will go so far as to say that none of them has done as much to raise the standard of living as money.”

“Damn it all,” said the fish buyer, “I’m not talking about superstitions. I’m talking about ideas.”

“Money also is an idea,” replied Old Mole, “and it is as generally misunderstood as any other.”

He was beginning to be rather excited, for he felt that he was getting the better of the argument, and would not allow himself to see that he had floundered on to the debater’s trick of shunting his opponents on to unfamiliar country. They had gone up and down one stretch of line, between two points—capitalism and labor—for so long, without looking on either side of them, that it needed only a very slight adjustment or transposition of terms to reduce them to a beating of the void. They clung to their point, and the postman at last said triumphantly:

“But money isn’t a religion; Socialism is—the religion, the only religion of the working classes of this country. They’ve had enough of the next world; they want a bit o’ this for a change.”

“So do I,” returned Old Mole, “all of it. I say that money is an idea, perhaps the only practicable idea in the world at present. It isn’t a religious idea simply because men as a whole are not religious. It has the advantage over your Socialism that it is a part of life as it is, while your religion, as you call it, is only a straining after the future life, an edifice without a foundation, for to bring about its realization you have to hew and cut and shape human nature to fit into the conditions of your fantasy. If I wanted to be a prophet, which I don’t—I should base my vision on money. There would be some chance then of everybody understanding it and really taking it into his life. If you could make money a religious idea—that is, make money a thing which men would respect and revere and abuse as little as possible—you would very likely produce something—deeds, not words and questions.”

“Don’t you call the strike ‘doing something’?” cried the fish buyer.

“We shall see,” replied Old Mole.

The postman filled his cutty and laughed:

“Don’t you see,” he said to the fish buyer, “that he is pulling your leg?”

So, convinced of their superiority, they abandoned the discussion.

His tussles with these Jeremiahs of the Yorkshire village gave Old Mole the confidence he needed, and the exultant glow of a sharpening of the wits, which are like razors, most apt to cut the wielder of them when they are most dull. He tortured himself no more with his failure to satisfy Matilda, but laid all his hopes in the future and the amusing life in London that he wished to create for her. Intensely he desired her to develop her own life, to grow into the splendid creature he now saw struggling beneath the crust of ignorance and prejudice and shyness and immaturity that hemmed her in. There was such beauty in her, and he had failed to make it his, a part of himself, and in his blundering efforts to teach her, to lead her on to the realization and gift of herself, he had wounded her even when he most adored her. . . . The dead woman, Enid, had been more to her than he had ever been. He saw that now. She had known in that woman’s lift something that was not in her own, and she desired it; how much it was painful to see. She never looked for it in him, but gazed in upon herself in a sort of pregnancy of the soul. And, like a pregnant woman, she must be satisfied in her whimsies, she must have her desires anticipated, she must be given the color and brightness of life, now before her sensitiveness had passed away for want of fair impressions. These she had been denied in the young years of her life. She must have them. . . . She must have them. . . .

She accepted his proposal to go to London without enthusiasm. She thought over it for some time and at last she said:

“Yes. It will be best for you. I don’t want you to go away again.”

And the night before they left, when the train-service was restored, she took out the necklace as she was undressing and tried it on, and looked at herself in the mirror and said:

“I’d like to wear this in London. But I shall want an evening dress, sha’n’t I?”

She smiled at him. His heart overflowed and colored the workings of his mind with a full humor. He thought:

“If there be ideas, how better can they be expressed than in terms of Matilda?”

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.

VI

OUT OF IT

When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing.

THE QUEEN OF HEARTS

Du bist wie eine Blume.

So rein und schÖn und hold . . .