Chapter VII: Appendix 347 (2)

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."

"_Them_selves."

"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."

"If I had my spectacles I could see who it is speaking."

"It's Mrs. Copas. Don't you know me, Mr. Mole?"

"I--er. I . . . . This is your house?"

"It's lodgings, Mr. Mole. You've been sick, Mr. Mole, you have. Prostrated on your back for nearly a week, Mr. Mole. You did give us all a turn, falling off the caravan like that into the King's high road. You'd never believe the pool of blood you left in the road, Mr. Mole. But it soon dried up. . . ."

He began to have a glimmering, dimly to remember, a road, a caravan, a horse's tail, dust, a droning voice behind him, but still the name of Copas meant nothing to him.

"Copas! Copas!" he said to himself, but aloud.

Mrs. Copas produced the spectacles and placed them on his nose. Then she leaned over him in his bed and in the loud indulgent voice with which the unafflicted humor the deaf, she said:

"Yes! Mrs. Copas. Matilda's aunt. _You know."_

That brought the whole adventure flooding back.

Matilda! The girl who wanted to speak properly, the girl whom he had found in the smelly little theater. No! Not in the theater! In the train! He writhed and went hot, and his head began to throb, and he felt a strange want of coördination among the various parts of his body.

"I'm afraid," he said, "I'm afraid I _am_ ill."

"There! There!" said Mrs. Copas. "We'll soon pull you round. I'm used to the nursing; not that Mr. Copas is ever ill. He says a nartist can't afford to be ill, but we had a comic once who used to have fits."

"It's very good of you. I must have been an incubus. I'm sure I must be taking you away from the theater."

"We've got a new tune on the organ and we're doing splendid business. Mr. Copas _will_ be glad to hear you've asked for your spectacles. . . . Doctor says you mustn't talk."

And, indeed, he had lost all desire to do so. His head ached so that he could not keep his eyes open, nor think, nor hear anything but a confused buzz, and he sank back into the luxury of feeling sorry for himself.

Nothing broke in upon that sensation until suddenly the organ stopped. That startled him and set him listening. In the distance, muffled, he could hear the huge booming voice of Mr. Copas, but not what he said.

"Nice people," he thought. "Nice kind people."

There were three medicine bottles by his bed-side. They suddenly caught his eye and he gazed at them long and carefully. One was full and two were half empty. Their contents were brown, reddish, and white.

"I must be very ill," he said to himself mournfully. There darted in on him a feeling of fun. "No one knows! I am ill and no one knows. Not a soul knows. They won't know. They won't ever know."

That seemed to settle it. "They" sank away. He hurled defiance after them, opened, as it were, a trap-door in the past, and gloated over the sight of "them" hurtling down and down. He felt better after that. The pain in his head was almost gone. His bed seemed to be floating, drifting, turning on the tide, while it was moored to Mrs. Copas. He gazed at her and saw in her the comfortable, easy, hovering present. He had only to cut the painter to drift out into the wide future. When he opened his mouth to tell Mrs. Copas that he remembered her perfectly she laid her finger on her lips and said "Ssh!" and when he insisted on grunting out a word, she smacked the back of her fat hand roguishly and cried:

"Naughty!"

At that he giggled helplessly and went on giggling until he was near crying.

"Histrionics!" said Mrs. Copas, and gave him brandy.

Matilda appeared at the door and was pushed out. At that Mr. Mole, who had seen her, began to weep and sobbed like a disappointed child, and went on sobbing until Matilda was allowed to come in and sit by his side. She sat on the bed, and he stopped his sobbing as abruptly as a horse will come to a standstill after a mad sunset gallop. Mrs. Copas left them.

Matilda sat stroking her cheek and gazing at him. She cocked her head on one side and said:

"Glad you're better, but I don't like men with beards. Napoleon didn't have a beard."

"How do you know?"

"I bought a book about him for a penny. I like Josephine."

"I don't know much about it, but I always felt sorry for her."

"She gave as good as she got. That's why I like her. . . . I had a part to do to-night."

"A long part?"

"No. I just had to say to uncle, 'Won't you give her another chance?' His erring wife had just returned to him."

"Did you do it well?"

"No. Uncle said no one who wasn't at the back of the stage could hear me."

"Oh! Did you like it?"

"Yes. I felt funny like."

Mr. Mole coughed. Matilda stopped.

"What did I say?"

"Funny like."

"Don't people say that?"

"It is unusual."

"Oh!"

"I wasn't a bit nervous. Uncle says that's a bad sign. He says I looked all right, though I'm sure I was an object with that paint stuff on my face and the red all in the wrong place. Aunt wouldn't let me do it myself. . . . You will cut your beard off?"

"I don't know. I might like it."

She handed him a mirror, and mischief danced in her eyes as she watched his disconcerted expression. "Bit of a surprise, eh?"

He could find nothing to say. Impossible for him to lay the mirror down. For years he had accepted a certain idea of his personal appearance--ruddy, heavy-jowled, with a twinkle behind spectacles surmounted by a passably high forehead that was furrowed by the lines of a frown almost deliberately cultivated for the purposes of inspiring terror in small boys delinquent. Now, in the sharpened receptivity of his issue from unconsciousness, his impression was one of roundness, round face, round eyes, round brow, round head (balder than he had thought)--all accentuated by the novelty of his beard, that was gray, almost white. Age and roundness. Fearful of meeting Matilda's gaze, he went on staring into the mirror. Her youth, the fun bubbling up in her, reproached him, made him feel defenceless against her, and, though he delighted in her presence, he was resentful. She had so many precious qualities to which he could not respond.

"I 'spect I must go now," she said.

"Yes. I'm rather tired."

She took the mirror from him, patted his hand, and soothed him, saying:

"You'll soon be up and doing, and then you'll begin to teach me, won't you?"

"How would it be if you came and read to me every evening before the play? Then we could begin at once."

"Shall I?" She warmed to the plan. "What shall I read?"

"You might read your book about Napoleon."

"Oh! Lovely!"

Mrs. Copas returned to give him his medicine and to tuck him up for the night.

"What day is it?" he asked.

"Saturday."

"Are there any letters for me?" He remembered then that there could be none, that he was no longer his old self, that an explosion in his affairs had hurled him out of his old habitual existence and left him bruised and broken among strangers.

"I would like," he said, "to shave to-morrow."

"Yes, yes," replied Mrs. Copas, humoring him. "I'm in the next room if you want anything. Doctor said you was to have as much sleep as you could get. Being Saturday night, and you an invalid, Mr. Copas bought you some grapes and sponge-cake, and he wants to know if you'd like some port wine. We thought it 'ud make you sleep."

He expressed a desire for port, and she bustled into the next room and came back with a tumblerful. He was, or fancied he was, something of a connoisseur, and he propped himself up and sipped the dark liquid, and, as he was wont, rolled it round his tongue. It tasted of ink and pepper. He wanted to spit it out, but, blinking up at Mrs. Copas, he saw the good creature beaming at him in rapt indulgence, and could not bring himself to offend her. With his gorge rising he sipped down about a third of the tumbler's contents and then feebly, miserably held it out toward her.

"A bit strong for you?"

He nodded, drew the bed-clothes up over his shoulders and feigned sleep. The light was put out and he heard Mrs. Copas creep into the next room. Sleep? The fiery liquor sent the blood racing and throbbing through his veins. The palms of his hands were dry and hot, and his head seemed to be bulging out of its skin. His ears were alert to every sound, and to every sound his nerves responded with a thrill. He could hear footsteps on the cobbles of the street outside, voices, hiccoughs, a woman's voice singing. These were the accompaniment to nearer sounds, a duet in the next room, a deep bass muttering, and a shrill argumentative treble. The bass swelled into anger. The treble roared into pleading. The bass became a roar, the treble a squeak. It was exciting, exasperating. In his bed Beenham tossed from side to side. He did not want to listen to their altercation, but sleep would not come to him. The bass voice broke into a crackling; then spluttering, furious sounds came. The treble squealed pitifully. Came the thud and smack of a fist on flesh and bone, a gasp, a whine, a whimper, another thud and smack, and growls from the bass, then silence. . . .

Sick at heart Old Mole lay in his bed staring, staring into the darkness, and the blood in him boiled and bubbled, and his skin was taut and he shivered. He had heard of men beating their wives, but as one hears of the habits of wild animals in African forests; he had thought of it as securely as here in England one may think of a man-eating tiger near an Indian village. Now, here, in the next room, the thing had happened. Manliness, that virtue which at school had been held up as the highest good, bade him arise and defend the woman. In theory manliness had always had things perfectly its own way. In practice, now, sound sense leaped ahead of virtue, counted the cost and accurately gauged the necessity of action. In the first place to defend Mrs. Copas would mean an intrusion into the sanctuary of human life, the conjugal chamber; in the second place, in spite of many familiar pictures of St. George of Cappadocia (subsequently of England), it would be embarrassing to defend Mrs. Copas in her night attire; in the third place, the assault had grown out of their altercation of which he had heard nothing whatever; and, lastly, it might be a habit with Mr. and Mrs. Copas to smite and be smitten. Therefore Old Mole remained in his bed, faintly regretting the failure of manliness, fighting down his emotion of disgust, and endeavoring to avoid having to face his position. In vain: shunning all further thought of the miserable couple in the next room, he was driven back upon himself, to his wretched wondering:

"What have I done?"

He had thrown up his very pleasant life in Thrigsby and Bigley, a life, after all, of some consequence, for what? . . . For the society of a disreputable strolling player who was blind with conceit, was apt to get drunk on Saturday nights, and in that condition violently to assault the wife of his bosom. And he had entered into this adventure with enthusiasm, had seen their life as romantic and adventurous, deliberately closing his eyes to the brutality and squalor of it. Thud, whack! and there were the raw facts staring him in the face.

There came a little moaning from the next room: never a sound from the bass: and soon all was still, save for the mice in the skirting board and occasional footsteps on the cobbles of the street outside.

No sleep came to Old Mole until the pale light of dawn crept into his room to show him, shivering, its meanness and poverty. It sickened him, but when in reaction he came to consider his old mode of living that seemed so paltry as to give a sort of savor to the coarseness of this. . . . Anyhow, he reflected, he was tied to his bed, could not take any action, and must wait upon circumstance, and hope only that there might not be too many violent shocks in store for him.

Mrs. Copas bore the marks of her husband's attentions: a long bruise over her right eye and down to the cheek-bone, and a cut on her upper lip which had swelled into an unsightly protuberance. Her spirit seemed to be entirely unaffected, and she beamed upon him from behind her temporary deformities. When she asked him if he had slept well, he lied and said he had slept like a top.

She brought him hot water, razor, brush and soap, and he shaved. Off came his beard, and, after long scrutiny of his appearance in the mirror and timid hesitation, he removed the moustache which had been his pride and anxiety during his second year at Oxford, since when it had been his constant and unobtrusive companion. The effect was startling. His upper lip was long and had, if the faces of great men be any guide, the promise of eloquence. There was a new expression in his face, of boldness, of firmness, of--as he phrased it himself--benevolent obstinacy. His changed countenance gave him so much pleasure that he spent the morning gazing into the mirror at different angles. With such a brow, such an upper lip, such lines about the nose and chin, it seemed absurd that he should have spent twenty-five years as an assistant master in a secondary school. Then he laughed at himself as he realized that he was behaving as he had not done since the ambitious days at Oxford when he had endeavored to decide on a career. Ruefully he remembered that in point of fact he had not decided. With a second in Greats he had taken the first appointment that turned up. His history had been the history of thousands. One thing only he had escaped--marriage, the ordinary timid, matter-of-fact, sugar-coated marriage upon means that might or might not prove sufficient. After that, visiting his friends' houses, he had sighed sentimentally, but, with all the eligible women of his acquaintance--and they were not a few--he had been unable to avoid a quizzical tone which forbade the encouragement of those undercurrents upon which, he had observed, middle-aged men were swept painlessly into matrimony. . . . Pondering his clean-shaven face in the mirror he felt oddly youthful and excited.

In the evening Matilda came as she had promised, with the book, which proved to be that Life of Napoleon by Walter Scott which so incensed Heine. The sun shone in at the window upon the girl's brown hair, and as she opened the book the church bells began to ring with such an insistent buzzing that it was impossible for her to read. As he lay in bed Old Mole thought of Heine lying in his mattress-grave, being visited by his _Mouche,_ just such another charming creature as this, young and ardent, and by her very presence soothing; only he was no poet, but a man dulled by years of unquestioning service. He gazed at Matilda as he could not recollect ever having gazed at a woman, critically, but with warm interest. There was a kind of bloom on her, the fragrance and graciousness that, when he had encountered it as a young man, had produced in him a delicious blurring of the senses, an almost intoxication wherein dreadfully he had lost sight of the individual in the possession of them, and considered her only as woman. Now his subjection to the spell only heightened his sense of Matilda's individuality and sharpened his curiosity about her. Also it stripped him of his preoccupation with himself and his own future, and he fell to considering hers and wondering what the world might hold for her. . . . Like most men he had his little stock of generalizations about women, how they were mysterious, capricious, cruel, unintelligent, uncivilized, match-making, tactless, untruthful, etc., but to Matilda he could not apply them. He wanted to know exactly how she personally felt, thought, saw, moved, lived, and he refused to make any assumption about her. This curiosity of his was not altogether intellectual: it was largely physical, and it grew. He was annoyed that he had not seen her come into the room to mark how she walked, and to procure this satisfaction he asked her to give him a glass of water. He watched her. She walked easily with, for a woman, a long stride and only a very slight swing of the hips, and a drag of the arms that pleased him mightily. As she gave him the glass of water she said:

"You do look nice. I knew you would, without that moustache."

She had a strong but pleasant North-Country accent, and in her voice there was a faint huskiness that he found very moving, though it was only later, when he analyzed the little thrills which darted about him in all his conversations with her, that he set it down to her voice. . . . She resumed her seat by the foot of his bed with her book in her hand, and his physical curiosity waxed only the greater from the satisfaction he had given it. He could find no excuse for more, and when the bells ceased he took refuge in talk.

"Where were you born, Matilda?"

"In a back street," she said. "Father was a fitter, and mother was a dressmaker, but she died, and father got the rheumatism, so as we all 'ad--had--to work. There was----"

"Were." She blushed and looked very cross.

"Were three girls and two boys. Jim has gone to Canada, and George is on the railway, and both my sisters are married, one in the country, and one in Yorkshire. I'm the youngest."

"Did you go to school?"

"Oh! yes. Jackson Street, but I left when I was fourteen to go into a shop. That was sitting still all day and stitching, or standing all day behind a counter with women coming in and getting narked----"

"Getting what?"

"Narked--cross-like."

"I see. So you didn't care about that?"

"No. There is something in me here"--she laid her hand on her bosom--"that goes hot and hard when I'm not treated fair, and then I don't care a brass farthing what 'appens."

She was too excited as she thought of her old wrongs to correct the last dropped aitch, though she realized it and bit her lip.

"I been in service three years now, and I've been in four places. I've had enough."

"And what now?"

"I shall stop 'ere as long as you do."

Something in her tone, a greater huskiness, perhaps, surprised him, and he looked up at her and met her eyes full. He was confused and amazed and startled, and his heart grew big within him, but he could not turn away. In her expression there was a mingling of fierce strength, defiance, and that helplessness which had originally overcome him and led to his undoing. He was frightened, but deliciously, so that he liked it.

"I didn't know," she said, "that uncle drank. Father drank, too. There was a lot in our street that did. I'm not frightened of many things, but I am of that."

He resented the topic on her lips and, by way of changing the subject, suggested that she should read. She turned to her book and read aloud the first five pages in a queer, strained, high-pitched voice that he knew for a product of the Board School, where every variance of the process called education is a kind of stiff drill. When she came to the end of a paragraph he took the book and read to her, and she listened raptly, for his diction was good. After he had come to the end of the first chapter she asked for the book again and produced a rather mincing but wonderfully accurate copy of his manner. She did not wait for his comment but banged the book shut, threw it on the bed, and said:

"That's better. I knew I could do it. I knew I was clever. . . . You'll stop 'ere for a bit when you're better. You mustn't mind uncle. I'll be awfully nice to you, I will. I'll be a servant to you and make you comfortable, and I won't ask for no wages. . . ."

"My dear child," replied Old Mole, "you can't possibly have enjoyed it more than I."

She was eager on that.

"Did you really, really like it?"

"I did really."

So began the education of Matilda. At first he drew up, for his own use, a sort of curriculum--arithmetic, algebra, geography, history, literature, grammar, orthography--and a time-table, two hours a day for six days in the week, but he very soon found that she absolutely refused to learn anything that did not interest her, and that he had to adapt his time to hers. Sometimes she would come to him for twenty minutes; sometimes she would devote the whole afternoon to him. When they had galloped through Oman's "History of England" she declined to continue that study, and after one lesson in geography she burned the primer he had sent her out to buy. When he asked her where Ipswich was she turned it over in her mind, decided that it had a foreign sound and plumped for Germany. She did not seem to mind in the least when he told her it was in England, in the Eastern Counties. . . . On the other hand, when he procured their itinerary for the next few months from Mr. Copas and marked it out on the map for her, she was keenly interested and he seized on the occasion to point out Ipswich and, having engaged her attention, all the county towns of England and Scotland.

"Where were you born?" she asked.

He found the village in Lincolnshire.

"And did you go to a boarding-school?"

He pointed to Haileybury and then to Oxford. From there he took her down the river to London, and told her how it was the capital of the greatest Empire the world had ever seen, and how the Mother of Parliaments sat by the river and made decrees for half the world, and how the King lived in an ugly palace within sight of the Mother of Parliaments, and how it was the greatest of ports, and how in Westminster Abbey all the noblest of men lay buried. She was not interested and asked:

"Where's the Crystal Palace, where they play the Cup-tie?"

He did not know where in London, or out of it, the Crystal Palace might be, and she was delighted to find a gap in his knowledge. On the whole she took her lessons very seriously, and he found that he could get her to apply herself to almost any subject if he promised that at the end of it she should be allowed to read. . . . Teaching under these circumstances he found more difficult than ever he had imagined it could be. In his Form-room by the glass roof of the gymnasium he had been backed by tradition, the ground had been prepared for him in the lower Forms; there was the whole complicated machinery of the school to give him weight and authority. Further, the subjects of instruction were settled for him by the Oxford and Cambridge Examination Board. Now he was somewhat nettled to find that, though he might draw up and amend curricula, he was more and more forced to take the nature and extent of his teaching from his pupil, who, having no precise object in view, followed only her instinct, and that seemed to bid her not so much to lay up stores of knowledge as to disencumber herself, to throw out ballast, everything that impeded the buoyancy of her nature.

They were very pleasant hours for both of them, and in her company he learned to give as little thought to the future as she. At first, after he recovered, he fidgeted because there were no letters. Day after day passed and brought him no communication from the outside world. Being a member of many committees and boards, he was used to a voluminous if uninteresting post. However, he got used to their absence, and what with work in the theater and teaching Matilda he had little time for regret or anxiety. He had been up from his bed a whole week before he bought a newspaper, that which he had been in the habit of reading in his morning train. It was dull and only one announcement engaged his attention; the advertisement of the school setting forth the fees and the opening date of the next term--September 19. That gave him four weeks in which freely to enjoy his present company. Thereafter surely there would be investigation, inquiry for him, the scandal would reach his relatives and they would--would they not?--cause a search for him. Till then he might be presumed to be holiday-making.

Meanwhile he had grown used to Mr. Copas's manner of living--the dirt, the untidiness, the coarse food, the long listlessness of the day, the excitement and feverishness of the evening. Mrs. Copas's disfigurements were long in healing, and when he was well enough he replaced her at the door and took the money, and sold the grimy-thumbed tickets for the front seats. He sat through every performance and became acquainted with every item in Mr. Copas's repertory. With that remarkable person he composed a version of "Iphigenia," for from his first sketch of the play Mr. Copas had had his eye on Agamemnon as a part worthy of his powers. Mr. Mole insisted that Matilda should play the part of Iphigenia, and Mrs. Copas was given Clytemnestra wherewith to do her worst. . . . The only portion of the piece that was written was Iphigenia's share of her scenes with Agamemnon. These Old Mole wrote out in as good prose as he could muster, and she learned them by heart. Unfortunately they were too long for Mr. Copas, and when it came to performance--there were only two rehearsals--he burst into them with his gigantic voice and hailed tirades at his audience about the bitterness of ingratitude in a fair and favorite daughter, trounced Clytemnestra for the lamentable upbringing she had given their child, and, in the end, deprived Iphigenia of the luxury of slaughter by falling on his sword and crying:

"Thus like a Roman and a most unhappy father I die of thrice and doubly damned, self-inflicted wounds. By my example let all men, especially my daughter, know there is a canon fixed against self-slaughter."

He made nonsense of the whole thing, but it was wonderfully effective. So far as it was at all lucid the play seemed to represent Agamemnon as a wretched man driven to a miserable end by a shrewish wife and daughter.

Much the same fate attended Mr. Mole's other contribution to the repertory, a Napoleonic drama in which Mr. Copas figured--immensely to his own satisfaction--as the Corsican torn between an elderly and stout Marie Louise and a youthful and declamatory Josephine. Through five acts Mr. Copas raged and stormed up and down the Emperor's career, had scenes with Josephine and Marie Louise when he felt like it, confided his troubles and ambitions to Murat when he wanted a rest from his ranting, sacked countries, cities, ports as easily and neatly as you or I might pocket the red at billiards, made ponderous love to the golden-haired lady of the Court, introduced comic scenes with the lugubrious young man, wept over the child, dressed up as L'Aiglon, whom he called "Little Boney," banished Josephine from the Court, and died on the battlefield of Waterloo yielding up his sword to the Duke of Wellington, represented by Mr. Mole, his first appearance upon any stage, with this farewell:

"My last word to England is--be good to Josephine."

It was the Theater Royal's most successful piece. The inhabitants of that little Staffordshire town had heard of the Duke of Wellington and they applauded him to the echo. Every night when they played that stirring drama, after Mr. Copas had taken his fill of the applause, there were calls for the Duke, and Mr. Mole would appear leading Josephine by the hand.

At the top of their success Mr. Copas decided to move on.

"In this business," he said, "you have to know when to go. You have to leave 'em ripe for the next visit, and go away and squeeze another orange. I said to Mrs. Copas, the night you came, that you looked like luck. You've done it. If you'll stay, sir, I'll give you a pound a week. You're a nartist, you are. That Wellington bit of yours without a word to say--d'you know what we call that? We call that 'olding the stage. It takes a nartist to do that."

Mr. Mole took this praise with becoming modesty and said that he would stay, for the present. Then he added:

"And about Matilda?"

"She's my own niece," replied Mr. Copas, "but I don't mind telling you that she's not a bit o' good. She ain't got the voice. She ain't got the fizzikew. When there's a bit o' real acting to be done, she isn't there. She just isn't there. There's a hole where she ought to be. I'm bothered about that girl, I am, bothered. She doesn't earn her keep."

"I thought she was very charming."

"Pretty and all that, but that's not acting. Set her against Mrs. Copas and where is she?"

Mr. Mole's own private opinion was that on the stage Mrs. Copas was repulsive. However, he kept that to himself. Very quietly he said:

"If Matilda goes, I go."

Mr. Copas looked very mysterious and winked at him vigorously. Then he grinned and held out a dirty hand.

"Put it there, my boy, put it there. What's yours?"

Within half an hour he had coaxed another ten pounds out of Mr. Mole's pocket and Matilda's tenure of the part of Josephine was guaranteed.

At their next stopping-place, on the outskirts of the Pottery towns, disaster awaited the company. A wheel of the caravan jammed as they were going down a hill and delayed them for some hours, so that they arrived too late in the evening to give a performance. Mr. Copas insisted that the theater should be erected, and lashed his assistants with bitter and blasphemous words, so that they became excited and flurried and made a sad muddle of their work. When at last it was finished and Mr. Copas went out himself to post up his bills on the walls of the neighborhood, where of all places he regarded his fame as most secure, he had got no farther than the corner of the square when he came on a gleaming white building that looked as though it were made of icing sugar, glittering and dazzling with electric light and plastered all over with lurid pictures of detectives and criminals and passionate men and women in the throes of amorous catastrophes and dilemmas. He stopped outside this place and stared it up and down, gave it his most devastating fore-and-aft look, and uttered one word:

"Blast!"

Then unsteadily he made for the door of the public-house adjoining it and called for the landlord, whom he had known twenty years and more. From the platform of the theater Mrs. Copas saw him go in, and she rushed to find Mr. Mole, and implored him to deliver her husband from the seven devils who would assuredly possess him unless he were speedily rescued and sent a-billposting.

Mr. Mole obeyed, and found the actor storming at the publican, asking him how he dare take the bread from the belly and the air from the nostrils of a nartist with a lot o' dancing dotty pictures. With difficulty Mr. Copas was soothed and placated. He had ordered a glass of beer in order to give himself a status in the house, and the publican would not let him pay for it. Whereupon he spilled it on the sanded floor and stalked out. Mr. Mole followed him and found him brooding over a poster outside the "kinema" which represented a lady in the act of saving her child from a burning hotel. He seized his paste-pot, took out a bill from his satchel, and covered the heads of the lady and her child with the announcement of his own arrival with new plays and a brilliant and distinguished company.

When he was safely round the corner he seized his companion by the arm and said excitedly:

"Ruining the country they are with them things. Last time I pitched opposite one o' them, when they ought to have been working my own company was in there watching the pictures."

"I have always understood," replied Mr. Mole, "that they have a considerable educational value, and certainly it seems to me that through them the people can come by a more accurate knowledge of the countries and customs of the world than by reading or verbal instruction."

Mr. Copas snorted:

"Have you _seen_ 'em?"

"No."

"Then talk when you have. I say it's ruining the country and pampering the public. Who wants to know about the countries and customs of the world? What men and women want to know is the workings of the human heart."

Unexpectedly Mr. Mole found himself reduced to triteness. The only comment that presented itself to his mind was that the human heart was a mystery beyond knowing, but that did not allow him to controvert the actor's dictum that no one wanted to know about the countries and customs of the world, and he wondered whether the kinematograph did, in fact, convey a more accurate impression of the wonders of the world than Hakluyt or Sir John Mandeville, who did, at any rate, present the results of their travels and inventions with that pride in both truth and lying which begets style.

He determined to visit the kinematograph, and after he and Mr. Copas had completed their round and made it possible for a large number of the inhabitants of the Potteries to become aware of their existence, he returned to the Theater Royal and fetched Matilda. They paid threepence each and sat in the best seats in the middle of the hall, where they were regaled with a Wild West melodrama, an adventure of Max Linder, a Shakespearean production by a famous London actor, a French drama of love and money, and a picture of bees making honey in their hive. Matilda liked the bees and the horses in the Wild West melodrama. When Max Linder climbed into a piano and the hammers hit him on the nose and eyes she laughed; but she said the French drama was silly, and as for the Shakespearean production she said:

"You can't follow the play, but I suppose it's good for you."

"How do you mean--good for you?"

"I mean you don't really like it, but there's a lot of it, and a lot of people, and the dresses are lovely. It doesn't get hold of you like uncle does sometimes."

"Your uncle says the kinemas are ruining the country."

"Oh! He only means they're making business bad for him."

"Your uncle says you'll never make an actress, Matilda."

"Does he?"

(Some one behind them said "Ssh!"

"Ssh yourself," retorted Matilda. "There ain't nothing to hear.")

"Does he?" she said. "What do _you_ think?"

"I'm afraid I don't know much about it."

For the first time he noted that when he was with Matilda his brain worked in an entirely novel fashion. It was no longer cool and fastidiously analytical, seizing on things and phenomena from the outside, but strangely excited and heated, athletic and full of energy and almost rapturously curious about the inside of things and their relation one with another. For instance, he had hitherto regarded the kinematograph as a sort of disease that had broken out all over the face of the world, but now his newly working mind, his imagination --that was the word for it--saw it as human effort, as a thing controlled by human wills to meet human demands. It did not satisfy his own demand, nor apparently did it satisfy Matilda's. For the rest of the audience he would not venture to decide. Indeed he gave little thought to them, for he was entirely absorbed by the wonder of the miracle that had come to him, the new vision of life, the novel faculty of apprehension. He was in a state of ferment and could not sort his impressions and ideas, but he was quite marvelously interested in himself, and, casting about for expression of it all, he remembered stories of seeds buried for years under mighty buildings in cities and how when the buildings were pulled down those seeds put forth with new vigor and came to flower. So (he said to himself) it had been with him. Excitedly he turned to Matilda and said:

"About this acting. Do you yourself think you can do it?"

"I'm sure I can."

"Then you shall."

The lights in the hall went up to indicate the end of the cycle of pictures.