Chapter VII: Appendix 347 (3)

All that night and through the next day his exaltation continued, and then suddenly it vanished, leaving him racked by monstrous doubts. His mind, the full exercise of which had given him such thrilling delight, seemed to become parched and shriveled as a dried pea. Where had been held out for him the promise of fine action was now darkness, and he sank deeper and deeper into a muddy inertia. Fear possessed him and brought him to agony, dug into his sides with its spur, drove him floundering on, and when out of the depths of his soul he strove to squeeze something of that soaring energy that had visited him or been struck out of him (he knew not which it was) he could summon nothing more powerful to his aid than anger. He wept tears of anger--anger at the world, at himself, and the blind, aimless force of events, at his own impotence to move out of the bog, at the folly and obstinacy which had led him to submit to the affront that had been put upon him by men who for years had been his colleagues and comrades. His anger was blown to a white heat by disgust when he looked back and counted the years he had spent in fatted security mechanically plying a mechanical profession, shut out by habit and custom from both imaginative power and the impotence of exhaustion. He raged and stormed and blubbered, and he marveled at the commotion going on within him as he pursued his daily tasks, read aloud with Matilda, argued with Mr. Copas, took money at the door of the theater in the evening, sat among the dirty, smelling, loutish audience. In his bitterness he found a sort of comfort in reverting to his old bantering attitude toward women, to find it a thousand times intensified. More than half the audience were women, poor women, meanly dressed, miserably corseted; the fat women bulged and heaved out of their corsets, and the thin women looked as though they had been dropped into theirs and were only held up by their armpits. There they sat, hunched and bunched, staring, gaping, giggling, moping, chattering, chattering . . . Ach! They were silly.

And the men? God save us! these sodden, stupid clods were men. They slouched and sprawled and yawned and spat. Their hands were dirty, their teeth yellow, and their speech was thick, clipped, guttural, inhuman. . . . Driven on by a merciless logic he was forced into consideration of himself. As he sat there at the end of the front row he turned his hands over and over; fat, stumpy hands they were, and he put them up and felt the fleshiness of his neck, the bushy hair growing out of his ears, and he ran them along his plump legs and prodded the stoutness of his belly. He laughed at himself. He laughed at the whole lot of them. And he tried to remember a single man or a single woman whom he had encountered in his life and could think of as beautiful. Not one.

He turned his attention to the stage. Copas was almost a dwarf, a strutting, conceited little dwarf, pouring out revolting nonsense, a hideous caricature of human beings who were the caricatures of creation. He said to himself:

"I must get out of this."

And he found himself using a phrase he had employed for years in dealing with small boys who produced slovenly work and wept when he railed at them:

"Tut! Tut! This will never do!"

At that he gasped. He was using the phrase to himself! He was therefore like a small boy in the presence of outraged authority, and that authority was (words came rushing in on him) his own conscience, his own essence, liberated, demanding, here and now, among men and women as they are, the very fullness of life.

He had not regained his mood of delight, but rather had reached the limit of despair, had ceased blindly and uselessly to struggle, but cunningly, cautiously began to urge his way out of his despond. Whatever happened, he must move forward. Whatever happened, he must know, discover, reach out and grasp.

And he blessed the illumination that had come to him, blessed also the blackness and misery into which, incontinently, he had fallen. He submitted to exhaustion and was content to await an accretion of energy.

Thereafter, for a little while, he found himself more akin to Mr. Copas, drank with him, cracked jokes with him, walked with him and listened to his talk. He began to appreciate Mrs. Copas and to understand that being beaten by a man is not incompatible with a genuine affection and sympathy for him. He speculated not at all, and more than ever his instruction of Matilda became dependent upon her caprice.

Her uncle now gave her a salary of five shillings a week and upon her first payment she went out and bought a cigar for her mentor. She gave three half-pence for it and he smoked it and she wore the band on her little finger. To guard against such presents in the future he bought himself a box of fifty Manilas.

Mrs. Copas began to sound him as to his resources. Losing patience with his evasions she asked him at last bluntly if he were rich. He turned his cigar round his tongue and said:

"It depends what you mean by rich."

"Well," she replied cautiously, feeling her ground, "could you lay your hands on fifty pounds without selling anything?"

"Certainly I could, or a hundred."

"A hundred pounds!"

Her eyes and mouth made three round O's and she was silenced.

Both were astonished and both sat, rather awkwardly, adjusting their financial standards. She took up her knitting and he plied his cigar. They were sitting on boxes outside the stage door in the warm August sunlight. She gave a discreet little cough and said:

"You don't . . . you didn't . . . have a wife, did you?"

"No. I have never had a wife."

"Think of that now. . . . You'd have a house-keeper maybe?"

"A married couple looked after me."

"Well, I never! Well, there's never any knowing, is there?"

He had learned by this time that there was nothing at all behind Mrs. Copas's cryptic utterances. If there were anything she could arrive at it by circumlocution, and in her own good time would make it plain. Her next remark might have some connection with her previous train of thought or it might not. She said in a toneless, detached voice:

"And to think of you turning up with our Matilda. And they do say how everything's for the best. . . . It's a pity business is so bad here, isn't it?"

Business was very bad. The faithful few of the district who always patronized Mr. Copas year after year attended, but they amounted to no more than fifty, while the young people were drawn off by the kinematograph. They even sank so far as to admit children free for three nights in the hope that their chatter would incite their parents to come and share the wonders they had seen. On the fourth night only four old women and a boy paid for admission.

The situation was saved by a publican on the other side of the square who, envious of his rival's successful enterprise with the kinematograph, hired the theater for a week's boxing display, by his nephew, who was an ex-champion of the Midlands with a broken nose and reputation.

That week was one of the most miserable depression. Mr. Copas drank freely. Mrs. Copas never stopped chatting, the company demanded their salaries up to date, accepted a compromise and disappeared, and the ex-champion of the Midlands took a fancy to Matilda. He followed her in the streets, sent her half-pounds of caramels, accosted her more than once and asked her if she did not want a new hat, and when she snubbed him demanded loudly to know what a pretty girl like her was doing without a lad. Chivalrously, not without a tremor, Mr. Mole offered himself as her escort in her walks abroad. They were invariably followed by the boxer whistling and shouting at intervals. Sometimes he would lag behind them and embark upon a long detailed and insulting description of Mr. Mole's back view; sometimes he would hurry ahead, look round and leer and make unpleasant noises with his lips or contemptuous gestures with his hands.

Matilda had found a certain spot by a canal where it passed out of the town and made a bee-line across the country. There was a bridge over a sluice which marked the cleavage between the sweet verdure of the fields and the soiled growth of the outskirts of the town. It was a lonely romantic spot and she wished to visit it again before they left. She explained to her friend that she wanted to be alone but dared not because of her pursuer, and her friend agreed to leave her on the bridge and to lurk within sight and earshot.

They had to go by tram. The boxer was twenty yards behind them. They hurried on, mounted the tram just as it was starting, and congratulated themselves on having avoided him. When they reached the bridge there he was sitting on the parapet, whistling and leering. Matilda flamed scarlet and turned to go. Boiling with fury Old Mole hunched up his shoulders, tucked down his head (the attitude familiar to so many Thrigsbians), and bore down on the offender. He grunted out:

"Be off."

" 'Ave you bought the bally bridge?"

And he grinned. The coarseness and beastliness of the creature revolted Mr. Mole, roused him to such a pitch of furious disgust, that he lost all sense of what he was doing, raised his stick, struck out, caught the fellow in the chest and sent him toppling over into the pool. He leaned over the parapet and watched the man floundering and splashing and gulping and spitting and cursing, saw his face turn greeny white with hard terror, but was entirely unmoved until he felt Matilda's hand on his arm and heard her blubbering and crying:

"He's drowning! He's drowning!"

Then he rushed down and lay on his stomach on the bank and held out his stick, further, further, as far as he could reach, until the lout in the water clutched it. The boxer had lost his head. He tugged at the stick and it looked for a moment as though there would be two men in the water. It was a question which would first be exhausted. Grayer and grayer and more distorted grew the boxer's face, redder and redder and more swollen Old Mole's, until at last the strain relaxed and Matilda's tormentor was drawn into shallow water and out on to the bank. There he lay drenched, hiccoughing, spitting, concerned entirely with his own discomfort and giving never a thought either to the object of his desires or his assailant and rescuer. At last he shook himself like a dog, squeezed the water out of his sleeves, sprang to his feet and was off like a dart along the towpath in the direction of the tall fuming chimneys of the town.

Matilda and Old Mole walked slowly out toward the setting sun and in front of them for miles stretched the regiments of pollarded willows like mournful distorted human beings condemned forever to stand and watch over the still waters.

"Life," said Old Mole, "is full of astonishments. I should never have thought it of myself."

"He was very nearly drowned," rejoined Matilda.

"It is very singular," said he, more to himself than to her, "that one's instinct should think such a life worth saving. A more bestial face I never saw."

"I think," said she, "you would help anybody whatever they were like."

She took his arm and they walked on, as it seemed, into the darkness. Until they turned, neither spoke. He said:

"I am oddly miserable when I think that in a fortnight the school will reopen and I shall not be there. I suppose it's habit, but I want to go back and I know I never shall."

"I don't want never to go back."

"Don't you? But then you're young and I'm rather old."

"I don't think of you as old. I always think of you as some one very good and sometimes you make me laugh."

"Oh! Matilda, often, very often, you make me want to cry. And men don't cry."

A little scornfully Matilda answered:

"_Don't_ they!"

Through his mournfulness he felt a glow of happiness, a little aching in his heart, a sort of longing and a pleasant pride in this excursion with a young woman clinging to his arm and treating him with sweet consideration and tenderness.

"After all," he thought, "it is certainly true that when they reach middle age men do require an interest in some young life."

So, having fished out a theory, as he thought, to meet the case, he was quite content and prepared, untroubled, to enjoy his happiness.

He did thoroughly enjoy his happiness. His newly awakened but unpracticed imagination worked like that of a sentimental and self-cloistered writer who, having no conception of human relationships, binds labels about the necks of his personages-- Innocent Girlhood, Middle-aged Bachelorhood, Mother's Love, Manly Honor, English Gentleman--and amuses himself and his readers with propping them up in the attitudes meet and right to their affixed characters. Except that he did not drag the Deity into it, Old Mole lived perfectly for a short space of time in a neatly rounded novelette, with himself as the touching, lamb-like hero and Matilda as the radiant heroine. He basked in it, and when on her he let loose a flood of what he thought to be emotion she only said:

"Oh! Go on!"

True to his sentimentality he was entirely unconscious of, absolutely unconcerned with, what she might be feeling. He only knew that he had been battered and bewildered and miserable and that now he was comfortable and at his ease.

The appointed end of all such things, in print and out of it, is marriage. Outside marriage there is no such thing as affection between man and woman (in that atmosphere passion and desire do not exist and children are not born but just crop up). True to his fiction--and how many men are ever true to anything else?--Old Mole came in less than a week to the idea of marriage with Matilda. It was offensive to his common sense, so repugnant indeed that it almost shocked him back into the world of fact and that hideous mental and spiritual flux from which he was congratulating himself on having escaped. He held his nose and gulped it down and sighed:

"Ah! Let us not look on the dark side of life!"

Then he asked himself:

"Do I love her? She has young dreams of love. How can I give her my love and not shatter them?"

And much more in this egoistic strain he said, the disturbance in his heart, or whatever organ may be the seat of the affections, having totally upset his sense of humor. He told himself, of course, that she was hardly the wife for a man of his position, but that was only by way of peppering his emotions, and he was really rather amazed when he came to the further reflection that, after all, he had no position. To avoid the consternation it brought he decided to ask Matilda's hand in marriage.

As it turned out, to the utter devastation of his novelette, it was his hand that was asked.

He bought Matilda a new camisole. He had heard the word used by women and was rather staggered when he found what it was he had purchased. Confusedly he presented it to Innocent Girlhood. She giggled and then, with a shout of laughter, rushed off to show Mrs. Copas her gift. He did not on that occasion stammer out his proposal.

He took her for three walks and two tram-drives at fourpence each, but she was preoccupied and morose, and gave such vague answers to his preliminary remarks that his hopes died within him and he discussed the Insurance Act and Lancashire's chances of defeating Yorkshire at Bradford. Moreover, Matilda was pale and drawn and not far from being downright ugly, far too plain for a novelette at all events. He felt himself sliding backward and could hear the buzz and roar of the chaos within himself, and the novelette was unfinished and until he came to the last jaunting little hope in the future, the last pat on the back for the hero, the final distribution of sugar-plums all round, there would be no sort of security, no sealed circle wherein to dwell. He felt sick, and the nausea that came on him was worse than the fear and doubt through which he had passed. He was like a man after a long journey come hungry to an inn to find nothing to eat but lollipops.

When they returned from their last tram-drive they had supper with Mr. and Mrs. Copas, who discussed the new actors whom they had engaged, as only two of the old company were willing to return. The new comic had acted in London, in the West End, had once made his twenty pounds a week. They were proud of him, and Mr. Copas unblushingly denounced the Drink as the undoing of many a nartist. Very early in the evening, before any move had been made to clear the plates and dishes away, Matilda declared herself tired, and withdrew. Mr. Copas went on talking and Mrs. Copas began to make horrible faces at him, so that Old Mole, in the vagueness of his acute discomfort, thought mistily that perhaps they were at the beginning of an altercation, which would end--as their altercations ended. However, the talk went on and the grimaces went on until at last Mr. Copas perceived that he was the object of them, stopped dead, seized his hat and left the room. Mrs. Copas beamed on Mr. Mole. She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. They were bare to the elbow and fat and coarse and red. She went on beaming, and nervously he took out a cigar and lit it. Mrs. Copas leaned forward and with a knife began to draw patterns with the mustard left on the edge of a plate.

"We'll be on the move again soon, Mr. Mole."

"I shall be glad of that."

"What we want to know, what I want to know and what Mr. Copas wants to know is this. What are you going to do about it?"

"I . . . I suppose I shall go with you."

"You know what I mean, Mr. Mole. Some folk ain't particular. I am. And Mr. Copas is very careful about what happens in his theater. If it can't be legitimate it can't be and there's nothing more to be said. . . . Now, Mr. Mole, what are you going to do?"

"My good woman! I haven't the least idea what you are talking about. I have enjoyed my stay with you. I have found it very instructive and profitable and I propose to----"

"It's Matilda, Mr. Mole. What's done is done. We're not saying anything about that. Some says it's a curse and some says it's the only thing worth living for. Matilda's my own husband's niece and I've got to see her properly done by whether you're offended with a little plain speaking or not, Mr. Mole."

She had now traced a very passable spider's web in mustard on the plate.

"If you need to be told, I must tell you, Mr. Mole. Matilda's in the way."

No definite idea came to Mr. Mole, but a funny little throb and trickle began at the base of his spine. He dabbed his cigar down into half a glass of beer that Mr. Copas had left.

"We've talked it out, Mr. Mole, and you've got to marry her or pay up handsome."

Marry! His first thought was in terms of the novelette, but those terms would not embrace Mrs. Copas or her present attitude. His first glimpse of the physical fact was through the chinks of his sentimental fiction, and he was angry and hurt and disgusted. Then, the fiction never having been rounded off, he was able to escape from it--(rare luck in this world of deceit)--and he shook himself free of its dust and tinsel, and, responding to the urgency of the occasion, saw or half-saw the circumstances from Matilda's point of view. Mentally he swept Mrs. Copas aside. The thing lay between himself and the girl. Out of her presence he could not either think or feel about it clearly. Only for himself there lay here and now, before him, the opportunity for action, for real, direct, effective action, which would lift him out of his despond and bring his life into touch with another life. It gave him what he most needed, movement, uplift, the occasion for spontaneity, for being rid, though it might be only temporarily, of his fear and doubt and sickness of mind. Healthily, or rather, in his eagerness for health, he refused to think of the consequences. He lit another cigar, steadying himself by a chair-back, so dazzled was he by the splendor of his resolution and the rush of mental energy that had brought him to it, and said:

"Of course, if Matilda is willing, I will marry her."

"I didn't expect it of you, being a gentleman," returned Mrs. Copas, obliterating her spider's web, "and, marriage being the lottery it is, there are worse ways of doing it than that. After all, you do know you're not drawing an absolute blank, which, I know, happens to more than ever lets on."

Mr. Mole found that it is much easier to get married in life than in sentimental fiction. He never proposed to Matilda, never discussed the matter with her, only after the interview with Mrs. Copas she kissed him in the morning and in the evening, and as often in between as she felt inclined. He made arrangements with the registrar, bought a special license and a ring. He said: "I take you, Matilda Burn, to be my lawful wedded wife," and she said: "I take you, Herbert Jocelyn Beenham, to be my lawful wedded husband." Mrs. Copas sat on the registrar's hat, and, without any other incident, they were made two in one and one in two.

In view of the approaching change in his condition he had written to his lawyer and his banker in Thrigsby, giving orders to have all his personal property realized and placed on deposit, also for five hundred pounds to be placed on account for Mrs. H. J. Beenham.

The day after his wedding came this letter from the Head Master:

"MY DEAR BEENHAM:--I am delighted that your whereabouts has been discovered. All search for you has been unavailing--one would not have thought it so easy for a man to disappear--and I had begun to be afraid that you had gone abroad. As I say, I am delighted, and I trust you are having a pleasant vacation. I owe you, I am afraid, a profound apology. If there be any excuse, it must be put down to the heat and the strain of the end of the scholastic year. I was thinking, I protest, only of the ancient foundation which you and I have for so long served. The Chairman of the Governors, always, as you know, your friend, has denounced what he is pleased to call my Puritanical cowardice. The Police have made inquiries about the young woman and state that she is a domestic servant who left her situation in distressing circumstances without her box and without a character. I do apologize most humbly, my dear Beenham, and I look to see you in your place at the commencement of the approaching term."

Old Mole read this letter three times, and the description of his wife stabbed him on each perusal more deeply to the heart. He tore the sheet across and across and burned the pieces on the hearth. Matilda came in and found him at it: and when she spoke to him he gave no answer, but remained kneeling by the fender, turning the poker from one hand to the other.

"Are you cross with me?" she said.

"No. Not with you. Not with you. Not with you."

"You don't often say things three times."

She came and laid her hands on his shoulders, and he took them and kissed them, for now he adored her.

In the evening came a knock at the front door. Mr. Mole was at the theater arranging for a new play with which to reopen when the boxing season, which had been extended, was over. The slut of a landlady took no notice, and the knock was repeated thrice. Matilda went down and opened the door and found on the step a short, plump, rotund, elegant little man with spectacles and a huge mustache. He asked for Mr. Beenham, and she said she was Mrs. Beenham. He drew himself up and was very stiff and said at the back of his throat:

"I am your husband's brother."

She took him upstairs to their sitting-room, and he told her how distressed he was at the news that had reached him and to find his brother living in such a humble place. He added that it was a serious blow to all his family, but that, for his part, the world being what it was and life on it being also what it was, he hoped that all might be for the best. Matilda let him have his say and tactfully led him on to talk about himself, and he told her all about his practice at the Chancery Bar, and the wine at his club, and his rooms in Gray's Inn, and his collection of Battersea china, and his trouble with the committee of his golf club, and his dislike for most of his relations except his brother Herbert, who was the last man in the world, as he said, he had ever expected to go off the rails. She assured him then that Herbert was the best and kindest of men, and that it would not be her fault if their subsequent career did not astonish and delight him. She did not drop a single aitch, and, noticing carefully his London pronunciation, she mentally resolved to change her broad a's and in future to call a schoolmaster a schoolmarster. . . . Their conversation came abruptly to an end, and she produced a pack of cards and taught him how to play German whist. From that he led her to double-dummy Bridge, and they were still at it when his brother returned. Matilda was scolded for being up so late, kissed, by both men, and packed off to bed.

Whisky was produced. Said brother Robert:

"Well, of all the lunatics!"

"So you've been shocked and amazed and horrified. Do the others know?"

"Not yet. . . . I thought I'd better see you first."

"All right. Tell them that I'm married and have become a rogue and a vagabond."

"You're not going on with this?"

"I am."

"Don't be a fool. Your wife's perfectly charming. There's nothing against her."

"That's had nothing to do with it. I'm going on for my own satisfaction. I've spent half my life in teaching. I want to spend the rest of it in learning."

"From play-actors? Oh! come!"

"My dear Robert, life isn't at all what you think it is. It isn't what I thought it was. I'm interested. I'm eager. I'm keen. . . ."

"And mad. . . ."

"Maybe. But I tell you that life's got a heart to it somewhere, and I'm going to find my way to it."

"Then you're not going back?"

"Never: neither to the old work, nor to the old kind of people."

"Not even when I tell you that Uncle Jocelyn is dead at last and has left us each ten thousand! Doesn't that make any difference, H. J.?"

H. J. received this intelligence almost with dismay. It took him back into the family councils, the family speculations as to Uncle Jocelyn's will, the family squabbles over Uncle Jocelyn's personal effects and their distribution, the family impatience at Uncle Jocelyn's unconscionable long time in dying. And the vision of it all irritated and weighed heavily on him. Often in Thrigsby he had said to himself that when Uncle Jocelyn died he would retire. And now Uncle Jocelyn was dead and he found his legacy rather a bewilderment than a relief. It was such a large sum of money that it made him fall back into his old sense of the grotesque in his relations with Mr. Copas and his galley, just when he was congratulating himself on being able to enter on his new life with real zest and energy.

"No," he said, "that makes no difference. I shall stay where I am."

"If there is ever any trouble," replied Robert, "I shall be only too glad to help."

"Thank you."

Robert tapped at his mustache and said:

"I suppose being married won't interfere with your golf."

"I'm afraid it will." This came very tartly.

"Er. . . . Sorry."

That had flicked Robert on the raw. He had been feeling indulgent toward his demented brother until his more than doubtful attitude toward ten thousand pounds. When that was followed with the renunciation of golf he was genuinely distressed and went away muttering behind his mustache:

"I give it up. I give it up. 'Pon my honor. _Non compos,_ don't y'know, _non compos_."

Nothing would induce Old Mole to visit Thrigsby again, and his solicitor had to send a clerk down with documents for his signature. When all the legal threads were tied up he told Matilda the extent of his fortune, and how he had been asked to return to his position at the school.

"Are you sorry?" she asked.

"No."

"You sha'n't ever be, for me. Will you read to me now?"

And he read the first two acts of "King Lear."

"That isn't the play you were reading the other day. The one about Venice and the man who was such a good soldier."

He had begun "Othello," but it had filled him with terror, for it had brought home to him the jealousy that was gnawing at his heart, creeping into his bones. Delivered from sentimentality by his surrender to his own generous impulse, sanded over as he was by years of celibacy, he had day by day more swiftly yielded to this woman whom he had taken for his wife, and had arrived at a passion torn, knotted, and twisted by jealousy of that other whom he had never known, whose child now waxed in her womb and brought her to long periods of almost self-hypnotized inward pondering, so that, though she was all grace, all tenderness and gratitude toward him, she was never his, never, even in their most pleasant moments, anything but remote. The agonies through which he passed made him only the more determined to be gentle with her, and often when he took her hand and pressed it, and she gave him not the pressure in return for which he hoped and so longed, he would be unable to bear it and would go out and walk for miles and cry out upon the injustice of the world. And then he would think that perhaps she loved him, perhaps it was an even greater torture to her to have this other between them; surely if that were so it must be keener suffering for her since it was her doing and her folly and not his. And he would hate the stain upon her, give way before the violence of his hatred, and call her unworthy and long with a sick longing for purity, an ideal mating, the first kindling in both man and woman so that each could be all to the other, wholly, with never so much as a thought lost in the past, never so much as the smallest wear and usage of anterior desire. . . . He would persuade himself that she did not love him at all; that she and the old bawd had entrapped him by sordid and base cunning. And those were the worst hours of all. But when he was with her and she gave him her smile or some little sudden friendly caress he would feel comforted and very sure of her and of the future when they would both forget, and then both his hatred and his longing for a perfect world would fall away from him and he would see them as absurd projections of those contrasts which arise and haunt the half-comprehending mind. And he would tell himself that all would be well; that they would be happy in the child which would be his also, for the love he had for her. And his jealousy would return.

Therefore he read "King Lear," and the pity of it purged him, though he was not without feeling that he, too, was cast out upon the barren places of the earth to face the storm and meet disaster. Feeling so he said to Matilda:

"Money and material things seem to have nothing to do with life at all. Here am I with you, whom I love. . . ."

"Do you?"

"I love you."

"Thank you."

"With you, and no possible anxiety as to the future, and yet I seem to myself to be on the very brink of explosion and disaster."

"Dear man, I wish you wouldn't think so much."

"I must think, or my feelings swamp me."

She thrilled him by taking his hand, and she said:

"Do you know what I want?"

"No. You shall have it."

"I want to make you happy."

That was the most definite assurance of her feeling for him she had as yet given him. It soothed his jealousy, made it easier for him to conquer it, but presently it laid him open to a new dread. The time for her confinement was drawing on, and he began to think that out, too; the violence and bloodiness of birth haunted him, the physical pain it entailed, the possibility of its being attended by death. She had promised him happiness, and she might die! He became over-scrupulous in his treatment of her and worried her about her health so that she lost her temper and said:

"After all, it's me that's got to go through with it, and _I_ don't think about it."

That brought him up sharp, and he held his peace and watched her. Truly she did not think about it. She accepted it. It was to her, it seemed, entirely a personal matter, perfectly in the order of things, to be worried through as occasion served. It might go well, or it might go ill, but meanwhile there were the things of the moment to be attended to and the day's pleasure to be seized. He was humbled and a little envious of her. For a little while he indulged in an orgy of self-reproach, but she only laughed at him and told him that when she had so much cause for feeling depressed he might at least comfort her with the sight of a cheerful face. He laughed, too, and told himself he was a selfish ass and that she was made that way and he was made another, and that perhaps men and women are made so, men thinking and women accepting, or perhaps they only become so in the progress of their lives.

Matilda's baby came four months after their marriage. It was still-born.

II

MARRIAGE

_Sie war liebenswürdig und er liebte sie: aber er war nicht liebenswürdig und sie liebte ihn nicht._

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."