Chapter VII: Appendix 347 (7)

He had been a rank failure at Oxford. He had no one but himself to blame, of course. Perhaps he had not given the place a fair trial, but at the end of his fourth term he had decided that it was no use going on, and removed himself. It was partly, he thought, that he could not endure Tibster, and partly that he had lost all power of concentrating on his work.

"I don't know," he said, "but at school there was always something to work for, to get to Oxford. When I got there I seemed to shoot ahead of it, to see beyond it, and in the place itself I could find nothing but Tibster and the Tibsterian mind, cut off from the world outside and annoyed because that world has a voluptuousness which is not in its own little box. I think I changed physically, grew a new kidney or another lobe of the brain. Anyhow, the world shrank and I became very large and unwieldy, and there was nothing positive in my existence except my dislike of Tibster."

"Did you smoke a great deal?" asked Old Mole.

"Only after the crisis."

"Did you make a verse translation of the Odyssey?"

"Only the first four books."

"I imagine, if you had taken your symptoms to Tibster, he would have put you right. The university has that effect on sensitive undergraduates, especially on non-Public School men. A sudden growth, a swift shooting from boyhood into the beginnings of manhood. It is very touching to watch; but Tibster must have seen it happen so often that it would be difficult for him to notice that it was happening to you more violently than usual."

"I never thought of it from Tibster's point of view."

"My dear Panoukian, I am only just beginning to see your affairs from your point of view, or, indeed, to admit that you have a point of view at all. . . . I hope it was not a great disappointment to your father."

Panoukian said his father had died during his second term. He had been attached to his father and was with him at the end, and perhaps that was what began the crisis. The business had gone to his brothers, but he was left enough to live on, and that was how he came to be in London. For the time being he was acting as secretary, unpaid, to Tyler Harbottle, M. P. for North Thrigsby and an old friend of his father's. Old Mole remembered Harbottle, a butter merchant in Thrigsby and president of the Literary Society, the Field Society, the Linnæan Society, the Darwin Club, the Old Fogies, and the Ancient Codgers, and formerly a member of the Art Gallery Committee, and, in that capacity, provocative of the outcry on the purchase of a picture by so advanced and startling a painter as Puvis de Chavannes. He asked Panoukian how he liked the House of Commons, and Panoukian said it was full of Tibsters with soap and chemicals and money on their brains instead of Greek and Latin and book philosophy.

"Harbottle is a Tibster, with a little nibbling mind, picking here and there, not because he is hungry, but because he is afraid some one else will get the pieces if he doesn't. I went to him because I wanted to work; but it isn't work, it's just getting in other people's way. And there are swarms of Harbottles in the House. I sometimes think that the whole of politics is nothing but Harbottling. It would be all very well to have the brake hard on if the country were going to Hell, but when it is a matter of a long, stiff hill it is heartrending."

And with a magnificent gesture he swept all the Tibsters and Harbottles away. Old Mole found his enthusiastic, sweeping condemnation very refreshing. There was youth in it, and he was beginning to value youth above all things. Above wisdom and experience? At least above the caution of inexperience.

Clearly Panoukian was prepared to go on talking, to leave Harbottle to go on nibbling without his aid, but Old Mole had begun to feel a chill, and rose to go. Panoukian was also going toward the India Office--Harbottle was corresponding with the Secretary about two Parsees who had been refused their right of appeal to the Privy Council--and so far they went together. As they parted Old Mole remembered Matilda's dinner party and Miss Dufresne. Panoukian seemed an excellent buffer. He invited him, and from the eagerness with which the invitation was accepted he surmised that Panoukian was rather lonely in London. Then he felt glad that he had asked him.

The party was very successful. Matilda was delighted to have another male, and that a young one, to admire her fine feathers, and Panoukian was obviously flattered and deliciously alarmed to meet a real live actress who confirmed him in his superstitious notions of the morals of the stage by flirting with him at sight. He was not very skilful in his response, but a very little subjugation was enough to satisfy Miss Dufresne: she only needed to know that she could an she would. He was very shy, and, with him, shyness ran to talkativeness. With Matilda he was like a schoolboy; his attitude toward her was a softening and rounding with chivalry of his attitude toward Old Mole. He hardly ever spoke to her without calling her Mrs. Beenham: "Yes, Mrs. Beenham"--"Don't you think so, Mrs. Beenham?"--"As I was saying to your husband, Mrs. Beenham. . . ." When he left he summoned up courage to ask Old Mole if he would bring Mrs. Beenham to tea with him. He lived in the Temple and had a wonderful view of St. Paul's and the river. Old Mole promised he would do so, and asked him to come in whenever he liked.

"It's awfully good of you," said Panoukian, and with that he went off with Miss Dufresne, who had engaged him to see her into a taxi. Matilda stood at the head of the stairs and watched them go down.

"Good night, dearie," called Miss Dufresne, and Panoukian, looking up, saw Matilda bending over.

"Good night, Mrs. Beenham," he cried.

Matilda, returning to the study, said:

"What a nice voice that boy has got."

"I used to expect great things of Panoukian," said Old Mole, "but then neither he nor I had seen beyond Oxford."

"Is he very clever?"

"He used to have the sort of cleverness schoolmasters like. It remains to be seen whether he has the sort of cleverness the world needs. He is very young."

"Not so _very_ young."

"Like your party?"

"Oh, yes."

"You looked very pretty."

"Thank you, sir."

"Good girl. What about bed?"

But she was loth to move. She began several topics, but soon dropped them. At last she plunged:

"Millie's going into a new piece. It's a real play this time. It's about the stage and there are to be a lot of chorus girls in it. She says she could get me in easily."

Old Mole took this in silence.

"I won't go if you don't like it," she said.

"Have you said you would go?"

"Yes, yes."

"Do you want to?"

"What else is there for me to do?"

Indeed, what was there? He was saddened and angry at the use of the argument. He had wanted her to feel free, to come and to go, so long only as she treated him with frankness, and here he had so far failed that she had made arrangements to return to the theater and then asked for his _post facto_ consent. What was it that kept her in awe of him? Not his thoughts of her, nor his feeling for her, so far as he knew either. . . . He kissed her good night and sat sadly brooding over it all: but it was too difficult for him, and he was tired and his humor would not come to his aid. He sought refuge in books, but they yielded him none, and at last Panoukian's phrase recurred to him:

"Perhaps," he said, "perhaps I am a Harbottler in marriage, nibbling at love. God help me if I am."

He thought surely he had reached the worst. But Fate is inexhaustibly ingenious. He was to have his bellyful of Harbottling.

Among his letters on the morning after the party he found one, the envelope of which bore in print the name of Langley Brown, Literary and Dramatic Agent, 9 Coventry Street, W. This letter informed him that Mr. Henry Butcher, of the Pall Mall Theater, proposed to immediately produce--(the split infinitive is Mr. Langley Brown's)--a play called "Lossie Loses," by Carlton Timmis, the rights of which Mr. Brown believe to be in Mr. Beenham's hands. And would Mr. Beenham call on Mr. Brown, or, if not, write to give his consent, when the contract would be drawn up and the play produced.

He had almost forgotten Carlton Timmis. The letter had been forwarded through his banker. He stared at it, turned it over and over, read it again. It seemed to be an authentic document. He handed it to Matilda. She said with awe:

"Mr. Butcher!"

And, with unconscious imitation of the humor of the English Bench, Old Mole asked:

"Who is Mr. Butcher?"

This was shocking ignorance. For twenty years and more Mr. Henry Butcher's name had been in the newspapers, on the hoardings, and his portrait, his wife's portrait, his baby's portrait, his dog's portrait, his horse's portrait had appeared in the magazines, and his commendation of a certain brand of cigarette had for the last ten years been used by the makers as an advertisement. For all that, his name and personality had not penetrated Old Mole's consciousness.

"Did you buy the play?" asked Matilda.

"I lent him fifty pounds, and he left it with me. I had no very clear idea as to his intention."

"Is it a good play?"

"You shall read it."

He unearthed it with some difficulty and gave it to her. She read it and wept over it.

"Is it a good play?" he asked.

"I don't know, but it's a lovely part."

He went to see Mr. Brown, a flashy little Cockney who peppered him with illustrious literary names and talked about everything but the business in hand. Old Mole asked where Timmis might be, and Mr. Brown said he had heard from him only once, and that from a place called Crown Imperial, in British Columbia.

"A good fellow, Timmis, but cracked. Impatient, you know. I never can make young writers see that they've got to wait until the old birds drop off the perch before their masterpieces can come home to roost."

"Is 'Lossie Loses' a masterpiece?" asked Old Mole innocently.

"Between ourselves," replied the agent, "I don't think there's much in it. But Mr. Butcher has been having a lean period lately and wanted something cheap, and thought he'd try a new author."

He produced the contract. Old Mole read it through in a sort of dream and signed it. He was shown out with a hearty handshake, and that very evening he received from Mr. Brown a check for ninety pounds--a hundred in advance of royalties less 10 per cent. commission. He was disconcerted. There was some uncanny wizardry in it that, by merely walking into an office and signing a paper, one could at the end of the day be the richer by ninety pounds with never a stroke of work done for it. His first impulse was to give the check to Matilda, but, on reflection, he decided to give her forty and to keep the fifty for Timmis if he could be found. He looked up Crown Imperial, British Columbia, on the map and in the gazetteer, but there was no mention of it, and, concluding that it must be a new place, he wrote to Timmis there in the hope of catching him. When he had posted his letter he remembered that Timmis might have dropped his stage name, and wrote another letter to Cuthbert Jones. Then he brushed the play from his mind.

Within a fortnight it was impossible to walk along any of the main thoroughfares of London without seeing the words "Lossie Loses," with the name of Mr. Henry Butcher in enormous letters, and the name of Carlton Timmis in very small print.

For the first night Old Mole received, with Mr. Butcher's compliments, a ticket for Box B. Panoukian and Robert came to dinner. Matilda wore her first evening dress and the opera cloak, a red ribbon in her hair, and graced the front of the box with the three men behind her.

There is a certain manner appropriate to a seat in the front of a box--a consciousness that is not quite self-consciousness, a certain setting back of the shoulders, a lifting of the head, a sort of shy brazenness, an acceptance of being part of the show, and, for all the pit knows, a duchess. Matilda had caught it to perfection and turned a dignified profile to the opera glasses directed upon her. Panoukian pointed out the political personages in the stalls, and, being a great reader of those glossy photographic papers, which are perhaps the most typical product of the time, was able to recognize many of the literary and artistic celebrities of the moment. Actresses glided fussily to their seats, smiling acknowledgment to the applause of the groundlings. There was a bobbing up and down, a bowing and a smiling, a waving of programs and fans from acquaintance to acquaintance, a chatter and hum of many voices that drowned the jigging overture, and went droning on into the first few moments of the play.

Old Mole's memory of it was hazy, but sufficiently alive to quarrel with some of the impressions he now had of it and to enable him to distinguish between the work of the actors and the work of the author. The play was worse and better than he had thought. In his recollection it was not so entirely unscrupulous in its appeal to the surface emotions, nor so extraordinarily adroit in sliding off into a dry, sly and perfectly irrelevant humor just at the moment when those base appeals looked as though they were going to be pushed so far as to offend even the thickest sensibilities. Each curtain was brought down with a neat, wistful little joke, except at the end of the third act, when, in silence, Lossie, the little unloved heroine of the play, prepared to cook the supper for the husband who had just left her. In the fourth act he came back and ate it, so that all ended happily. The atmosphere was Lancashire, and the actors spoke Scots, Irish, Belfast, Somerset, and Wigan, but that did not seem to matter. The actress who played Lossie spoke with a very good Thrigsby accent, and her performance was full of charm. She had a fine voice and knew how to use it, and her awkwardness of gesture suited the uncouthness with which the Lancashire folk were endowed. She and the sad little jokes carried all before them, and there was tremendous applause at the end of each act and the close of the play.

Mr. Henry Butcher made a grateful little speech, and, looking toward Old Mole's box, said the author was not in the house. All eyes were turned toward the box, and the shouting was renewed.

Entirely unconscious of the attention and interest they were arousing, the party escaped. Robert was hungry and insisted on having oysters. As they ate them they discussed the play. Robert and Matilda were enthusiastic, Old Mole was dubious and depressed, and Panoukian contemptuous.

"I've seen worse," he said, "but nothing with quite so much effrontery. It was like having your face dabbed with a baby's powder puff. I felt all the time that in a moment they would have a child saying its prayers on the stage. But they never did, and there was extraordinary pleasure in the continual dread of it, and the continual sense of relief. And every now and then they made one laugh. I believe it will succeed."

It succeeded. The critics unanimously agreed that the new play had charm, and, said one of them: "It is with plays, as with women; if they have charm, you need look no further. All London will be at Lossie's feet."

At the end of the first week Old Mole received a check for one hundred and ten pounds; at the end of the second a check for one hundred and twenty-five. He sent two cablegrams to Carlton Timmis and Cuthbert Jones at Crown Imperial, British Columbia. No answer. Timmis (or Jones) had disappeared.

Money poured in.

The play was bought by cable for America, and five hundred pounds passed into Old Mole's account. It became almost a horror to him to open his letters lest they should contain a check.

Worst of all, the newspapers scented "copy." A successful play, a vanished author, no one to claim the fame and fortune lying there. One paper undertook to find Carlton Timmis. It published photographs of him, scraps of biography and anecdotes, but Timmis remained hidden, and the newspapers yelled, in effect, "Where is Timmis? The public wants Timmis. Wireless has tracked a murderer to his doom, surely it cannot fail to reveal the whereabouts of the public's new darling?" Another journal found its way to the heart (_i.e.,_ the box office) of the theater and asked in headlines, "_Is Butcher Paying Royalties_?" Butcher wrote to say that he was paying royalties to the owner of the play, whose name was not Carlton Timmis. And at last a third newspaper announced the name of the beneficiary of the play--H. J. Beenham. Gray's Inn was besieged. Old Mole was in despair and declared that they would have to pack up and go away until the uproar had died down, but, more sensibly, Matilda invited a journalist in, gave him a drink, and told him the little there was to tell. The next check was for a hundred and eighty pounds.

Money poured in.

Five companies were sent out with "Lossie Loses" in America, three in England, and the play was given in Australia and South Africa. It was also published. Money poured in. It came in tens, in hundreds, in thousands of pounds. It became a purely automatic process, and Old Mole quickly lost interest in it and ceased to think about it. He told himself that it would soon come to an end, that such a violent eruption of gold could not last very long, and his attention was engrossed by its effects.

In his own mind it had brought about no moral crisis like that of his first catastrophe, but, insensibly, it had altered his point of view, given him a sense of security that was almost paralyzing in its comfort. All his old thoughts had been in self-protection against the people with whom he had come in contact, people to whom he was a stranger, different from themselves, and therefore suspect. But now in London when he met new people they bowed before him, put themselves out to ingratiate him, almost, it seemed, though he hated to think so, to placate him. His name was known. He was Mr. Beenham, and was somehow responsible for "Lossie Loses," which everybody had seen and the public so loved that three matinées a week were necessary, and there were beginning to be Lossie collars and Lossie hats and Lossie muffs and Lossie biscuits and Lossie corsets. . . . And his sister had called on Matilda and removed that source of bitterness. And at the club men sought his acquaintance. He had letters from more than one of his old colleagues at Thrigsby and several of his former pupils sought him out. A few of them were distinguished men--a doctor, a barrister, a journalist, the editor of a weekly literary review. They invited him to their houses, and he was delighted with the ease and grace with which Matilda bore herself and was more than a match for their wives, and became friendly with one or two of them. They moved among people whose lives were easy and smooth-running in roomy, solidly furnished houses, all very much like each other in style and taste. The people they met at these houses in South Kensington and Hampstead were almost monotonously alike. At the doctor's house they met doctors, at the barrister's solicitors and more barristers, at the editor's journalists and writers. They were different only in their professions: those apart, they were as alike as fossil ammonites in different strata: and they all "loved" "Lossie Loses." The women were very kind to Matilda and invited her to their tea parties and "hen" luncheons. She read the books they read and began to have "views" and opinions, and to know the names of the twentieth century poets; she picked up a smattering of the jargon of painting and music just as she caught the trick of being smart in her dress, and for the same reason, because the other women had "views" and opinions and talked of music and painting and were smart in their dress. The eruption of gold into their lives had blown her desire to return to the theater into the air. She was fully occupied with dressing, buying clothes, ever more clothes, and arranging for the hospitality they received and gave.

Her husband was amazed at the change in her. It was as startling as the swift growth of a floundering puppy into a recognizable dog. It was not merely a matter of pinning on clothes and opinions and a set of fashionable ideas: there was real growth in the woman which enabled her to wear these gewgaws with ease and grace so that they became her and were an ornament, absurd it is true, but so generally worn--though rarely with such tact--that their preposterousness was never noticed in the crowd. She was gayer and easier, and she seemed to have lost the tug and strain at her heart. Often in the daytime she was dull and listless, but she never failed to draw upon some mysterious reserve of vitality for the evening.

He was sometimes alarmed when he watched the other women who had not her freshness, and saw how some of them had ceased to be anything but views and opinions and clothes. But he told himself that she was not tied, as the rest were, by their husband's professions, to London, and that they could always go away when they were tired of it. . . . He was often bored and exhausted, but he put up with it all, partly because of the pleasure she was finding in that society, and partly because he felt that he was getting nearer that indeterminate but magnetically irresistible goal which had been set before him on--when was it?--on the night when his thoughts had taken form and life and he had been launched into that waking dreamland. With that, even the most violent happenings seemed to have very little to do; they were almost purely external. One might have a startling adventure every day, and be no nearer the goal. One might have so many adventures that his capacity to enjoy them would be exhausted. There was, he felt sure, as he pondered the existence of these professional people and saw how many of them were jaded by habit, but were carried on by the impetus of the habits of their kind, so that they were forever seeking to crowd into their days and nights far more people, thoughts, ideas, books, æsthetic emotions than they would hold--there was somewhere in experience a point at which living overflowed into life and was therein justified. So much seemed clear, and it was that point that he was seeking. In his relationship with Matilda, in his love for her, he had striven to force his way to it. The violence of his meeting with her, the brutality of his breach with his old existence, had, by reflex action, led him to violence and brutality even in his kindness, even in his attempted sympathy.

That seemed sound reasoning, and it led him to the knowledge that Matilda had plunged into the life of the professional people with its round of pleasures and functions, its absorption in tailors and mummers and the amusers of the people, its entire devotion to amusement, as a protection against himself. It was an unpleasant realization, but amid so much pleasantness it was bracing.

Money poured in. "Lossie Loses" was visited by all the Royal Family. When it had been performed two hundred and fifty times the Birthday Honors list was published and Henry Butcher was acclaimed "our latest theatrical knight." He gave a supper party on the stage to celebrate the two occasions; and he invited Mr. and Mrs. Beenham.

There were present the Solicitor-General, Mr. Justice Sloppy, the three celebrated daughters of two dukes, the daughters-in-law of three Cabinet Ministers, a millionaire, two novelists, five "absolutely established" dramatists, three dramatic critics, nine theatrical knights, the ten most beautiful women in London, the Keeper of the Coptic Section of the South Kensington Museum, Tipton Mudde, the aviator, and Archdeacon Froude, the Chaplain of the Actors' Union. There were others who were neither named nor catalogued in the newspaper (Court and Society) next day. As Mr. Justice Sloppy said, in the speech of the evening: "For brains and beauty he had never seen anything like it. . . ." The toasts were the King, Sir Henry Butcher, Lossie, and the Public, and there, as Panoukian remarked when the feast was described to him, you have the whole thing in a nutshell, the topnotch of English philosophy, the expression of the English ideal, lots of food, lots of drink, lots of talk, of money, of people, and then a swollen gratitude--"God bless us every one." And Panoukian then developed a theory that England, the English character, had reached its zenith and come to flower and fruit in the genius of Charles Dickens. Thereafter was nothing but the fading of leaves, the falling of leaves, the drowsing into hibernation. He was excited by the idea of falling leaves to describe the intellectual and moral activity of the country. It would seem to explain the extraordinary predominance of the Harbottles, who were so thick upon every English institution that Vallombrosa was nothing to it.

Old Mole met Tyler Harbottle again, and, allowing for Panoukian's youthful exaggeration, had to admit the justice of his estimate. Harbottle was very like a falling leaf, blown hither and thither upon every gust of wind, dropping, skimming, spinning in the air, but all the time obeying only one impulse, the law of gravity, which sent him down to the level of the ground, the public. Seeing nothing but the public, nothing beyond it, hoping for nothing but a comfortable resting place when at last he came to earth, Harbottle was under the illusion that the winds that tossed him came from the public, and when they blew him one way he said, "I will go that way," and when they blew him another he said, "I will go this." He was a Unionist Free Trader in theory and by label: in practice he was an indefatigable wirepuller. By himself he was unimportant, but there were so many of him and his kind that he had to be placated.

Old Mole met all the Harbottles. After Sir Henry Butcher's party he and Matilda were squeezed up into a higher stratum of society. Tipton Mudde took Matilda up in his monoplane and thereafter their whole existence grew wings and flew. They now met the people of whom their professional acquaintances had talked. The triumph of "Lossie Loses" continued: it was said the play would beat the record of "Our Boys." Money poured in, and almost as bewildering was the number of invitations--to vast dinner parties, to at homes, to drawing-room meetings, to boxes at the Opera, to luncheons at the luxurious hotels, to balls, to political receptions, to banquets given to celebrate honors won or to mark the end of a political campaign, or to welcome an actor-manager home from Australia. Whenever a Harbottle pulled out a plum from the pie than the subtler Harbottles buzzed like flies around it and arranged to eat and drink and make merry or at least to make speeches.

For a time it was very good fun. Old Mole and Matilda did as the Harbottles did. They had so many engagements that they were compelled to buy a motorcar and to engage a chauffeur. Without it Matilda could never have found time to buy her clothes. She went to the dressmaker patronized by all the female Harbottles, but the dressmaker made for an old-fashioned duchess, who adhered to the figure of the nineties and refused to be straight-fronted. The female Harbottles fled from this horrid retrogression and made the fortune of an obscure little man in Chelsea.

It was good fun for a time, and Old Mole was really interested. Here on the top of English life, its head and front--for the great-leisured governing classes no longer governed; they had feudal possessions but not the feudal political power--was a little world whizzing like a zoetrope. You might peep through the chinks and the figures inside it would seem to be alive, but when you were inside it there were just a number of repetitions of the same figures in poses disintegrated from movement. The machine whizzed round, but what was the force that moved it? Impossible to enter it except by energy or some fluke that made you rich enough or famous enough for there to be flattery in your acquaintance. True, Old Mole only saw the figures inside the machine arranged for pleasure. They were workers, too, but their pleasure was a part of their work. Lawyers who were working eighteen hours a day could find time to visit three great entertainments in an evening; politicians after an all-night sitting in the House could dine out, see two acts of the Opera, or the ballet, or an hour or so of a revue, and then return to the division Lobbies; actors, after two performances in the day, could come on to a reception at midnight and eat caviare and drink champagne. There were very few of whom it could be said that the rout was the breath of their nostrils; but all continued in it, all accepted it as a normal condition of things, as the proper expression of the nation's finest energies. Impossible to avoid it, furtherance of ambition and young devotion to an ideal both led to it. . . . Pitchforked into it so suddenly, with so many vivid impressions after wanderings, Old Mole felt how completely it was cut off from the life of the country, because from the inside and the outside of the machine things looked so entirely different. He had to go no further than his own case. On all hands he heard it said so often that "Lossie Loses" was a wonderful play--"so delicate, so fanciful, so full of the poetry of common things"--that it needed only a very little weakening of his critical faculty for him to begin to believe it and greedily to accept the position it had given him. As it was, knowing its intrinsic falsehood and baseness, he marveled that people of so much intelligence could be bemused by success into such jockeying of their standards. But he began to perceive that there were no standards, neither of life nor of art. There could not be, for there was no time for valuation, just as there was no time for thinking. Here and there he found an ideal or two, but such wee, worn, weary little things, so long bandied about among brains that could not understand them and worried into a decline by the shoddy rhetorical company they had been forced to keep. Arguing from his own case, Old Mole came to the conclusion that the whole whirligig had come about from a constant succession of decent ordinary mortals having been, like himself, the victims of an eruption of gold which had carried them, without sufficient struggle or testing of imagination or moral quality, to an eminence above their fellows, upon which, in their bewilderment, they were conscious of nothing but a dread of falling down. In that dread, sharing no other emotion, they clung together fearfully, met superficially, were never content unless they were meeting superficially, creating flattery and even more flattery to cover their dread. And, as they were forever gazing downward into the depths from which they had been raised, it was impossible for them to see more than a yard or so further than their own feet. Fearful of taking a false step, they never moved; their minds curled up and went to sleep. They could create nothing, and could only imitate and reproduce. They had abandoned the dull habits of the middle class and yet were the slaves of middle-class ideas. There were very charming people among them, but they accepted good-humoredly that England had nothing better to offer. They had pleasant houses in Town and in the country, delightful and amusing people to visit them, to keep them from boredom, and they asked no more.

Old Mole studied the history of England, the railway frenzy, the growth of the manufacturing districts, the foundation of the great shipbuilding yards, the immense eruption of gold that had swept away the old, careless, negligent, ruling squires, and set in their place those who could survive the scramble. And the scramble had never ceased; it had been accepted as the normal state of things. The heat and excitement of the rout gave the illusion of energy, which, being without moral direction, was pounced upon by the English desire for comfort and the appearance of solidarity, the mania for having the best of everything in the belief that it will never be bettered. So against the inconveniences of an antiquated system of laws, a mean and narrow code of morals, the consequences of their own reckless disregard of health in the building of the great cities of industry, in the payment of those who labored in them, they padded themselves in with comfort, more and more of it.

"Almost," said Old Mole, "I am persuaded to become a Jew, to sweat the sweaters, pick the profits, rule the world in honor of the cynical Hebrew god who created it, and live in uneasy triumph in the domestic virtues and worship of the flesh uncrucified."

Once you have been drawn into the machine it is very difficult to get out of it. Old Mole struggled, but money and invitations came pouring in. "Lossie Loses" survived two holiday seasons. During the second the actress who played Lossie went away on her vacation, and Matilda, urged on by Butcher, with whom she had become friendly, played the part, was successful, and gave the piece a new spurt of vitality. It was not a brilliant performance, but then a brilliant performance would have killed the play. The play needed charm, Matilda had it, and, by this time, among so many expertly charming women, she had learned how to manipulate it. Her appearance on the stage extended her popularity among her distinguished acquaintances, but subtly changed her status, and she had to learn how to defend herself. Her life became more exciting and she expanded in response to it. She distressed Old Mole by talking about her adventures, and he began to think it was really time to go.

They went abroad for several months, to Paris, Florence, Rome, Sicily, Algiers, but as they stayed in luxurious and expensive hotels they might almost as well have stayed in London. Old Mole discovered nothing except that the eruption of gold must have been universal and that the character of the English nation had found its most obvious expression in its stout, solid, permanent telegraph poles.

They returned to London, and Matilda accepted a small part in a new play by a famous dramatist, who had borrowed "Lossie" from the "greatest success of the century," called her "Blendy," and set her to leaven the mixture he had produced after the two years' hard work fixed as the proper quantum by Henrik Ibsen.

More success.

And Old Mole, feeling that he was now beyond all hope of escape, since he was suffering from a noticeable fatty degeneration of the will, had argued with Matilda, but she had had her way, for he could find no rejoinder to her plea that it was "something to do."

He refused to leave Gray's Inn. She was tired of it; said the rooms were cramped, but he clung to it as an anchorage.

There was a steadying of their existence. She took her work seriously, and rested as much as possible during the day. In the evenings he missed her, and he detested having his dinner at half-past six. But the discomfort was a relief and gave him a much needed sharpening of the wits. Every night he met her at the theater and made more acquaintances in it. He applied his theory of the eruption of gold to them, and, studying them for that purpose, was amazed to find how little different they were from Mr. Copas and the miserable John Lomas. Copas had been untouched by the eruption. These men, and particularly Henry Butcher and Matilda's manager, were Copas varnished and polished. Beneath the varnish they were exactly the same; self-important, self-centered, entirely oblivious of life outside the theater, utterly unheeding of everything outside their profession that could not be translated into its cant and jargon, childishly jealous, greedy of applause, sensitive of opinion, boys with the appetites and desires of grown men, human beings whose development had been arrested, who, in a healthy society, would be rogues and vagabonds, or wandering adventurers, from sheer inability to accept the restrictions and discipline imposed by social responsibility. They were cruelly placed, for they were in a position needing adult powers, having audiences night after night vaster than could be gathered for any divine or politician or demagogue; they had to win their own audiences, for no theater was subsidized; and when they had won them they were mulcted in enormous sums for rent; they were sucked, like the other victims of the eruption, into the machine, the zoetrope, and being there, in that trap and lethal chamber of spontaneity, they had to charm their audiences, with nothing more than the half-ideas, the sentimental conventions, the clipped emotions of their fellow sufferers. They were squeezed out of their own natures, forced into new skins, could only retain their positions by the successful practice of their profession, and were forced to produce plays and shows out of nothing, being robbed both of their Copas-like delight in their work and of their material for it. Their position was calamitous and must have been intolerable without the full measure of applause and flattery bestowed on them.

Clearly it was not through the theater that Old Mole could find the outlet he was seeking.

He turned wearily from its staleness, and told himself, after long pondering of the problem, that he had been mistaken, that he had been foolishly, and a little arrogantly, seeking in life the imaginative force, the mastery of ideas and human thoughts and feelings that he had found in literature. Life, maybe, proceeds through eruption and epidemic; art through human understanding and sympathy and will. . . . That pleased him as a definite result, but at once he was offended by the separation, yet, amid so much confusion, it was difficult to resist the appeal of so clean and sharp a conception. It lost the clarity of its outline when he set it against his earlier idea of living brimming over into life. . . . There were then three things, living, life and art, a Trinity, three lakes fed by the same river. That was large and poetic, but surely inaccurate. For, in that order, the lakes must be fed by a strange river that flowed upward. . . . Anyhow, it was something to have established the three things which could comprise everything that had penetrated his own consciousness, three things which were of the same essence, expressions of the same force. Within the action and interaction there seemed to be room for everything, even for Sir Henry Butcher, even for Tyler Harbottle, M.P.

He had arrived at the sort of indolent charity which, in the machine, passes for wisdom and sanity, the unimaginative tolerance which furs and clogs all the workings of a man's mind and heart. It is not far removed from indifference. . . . In his weariness, the exhaustion and satiety of the modern world, he measured his wisdom by the folly of others, and in his satisfaction at the discrepancy found conceit and thought it confidence. He began to write again and returned to his projected essay on Woman, believing that he had in his idea disentangled the species from Matilda. He was convinced that he had risen above his love for her, to the immense profit of their relationship, which had become more solid, settled and pleasurable. As he had planned when they came to London, so it had happened. They had gone their ways, seemed for a time to lose sight of each other, met again, and were now--were they not?--journeying on apace along life's highway, hailing the travelers by the road, aiding the weary, cracking a joke and a yarn with those of good cheer, staying in pleasant inns.

"Something like a marriage!" thought he. "Life's fullest adventure."

And he measured his marriage against those of the men and women in the machine; sour captivity for the most part, or a shallow, prattling and ostentatious devotion.

His essay on Woman was only a self-satisfied description of his marriage. Out of the writing of it came no profit except to his vanity. Preoccupied with questions of style, he pruned and pared it down, refashioned and remodeled it until at last he could not read it himself. Having no convenient sands in which to bury it, he gave it to Panoukian to read.

Panoukian was in that stage of development (which has nothing to do with age) when a man needs to find his fellows worshipful and looks for wonders from them. He was very young, and kindness from a man older than himself could bowl him over completely, set his affections frothing and babbling over his judgment, so that he became enslaved and sycophantish, and prepared, mentally if not physically, to stand on his head if it so happened that the object of his admiration could be served by it. He was in a nervous state of flux, possessing small mastery over his faculties, many of which were only in bud; his life was so little his own, was so shapeless and unformed that there could be no moderation in him; his admirations were excessive, had more than once landed him in the mire, so that he was a little afraid of them, and to guard against these dangers sought refuge in intolerance. To prevent himself seeing beauty and nobility and being intoxicated by them, he created bugbears for himself and hated them, and was forever tracking them down and finding their marks in the moot innocent persons and places. He was very young, mightily in love with love, so that he was forever guarding himself from coming to it too early and being fobbed off with love cheapened or soiled. His passion was for "reality," of which he had only the most shapeless and uncommunicable conception, but he was always talking about it with fierce denunciations of all the people who seemed to him to be deliberately, with criminal folly, burking it. For this reality his instinct was to preserve himself, and he lived in terror of his loneliness driving him to headlong falls from which he might never be able to recover. He was a full-blooded, healthy young man and must have been wretchedly unhappy had it not been that people, in their indolent, careless way, were often enough kind to him to draw off some of his accumulated enthusiasm in an explosive admiration and effusive, though tactfully manipulated, affection. Old Mole was kinder to him than anyone had ever been except his father, but then his father had had no other methods than those of common sense, while in Old Mole there was a subtlety always surprising and refreshing. Also Old Mole was prepared almost indefinitely, as it seemed, to listen to Panoukian's views and opinions and rough winnowing of the wheat from the chaff of life, so far as he had experienced it.

Panoukian therefore read Old Mole's manuscript with the fervor of a disciple, and found in it the heat and vigor which he himself always brought to their discussions. The essay, indeed, was like the master's talk, cool and deliberate, broken in its monotony by comical little stabs of malice. The writing was fastidious and competent. Panoukian thought the essay a masterpiece, and there crept a sort of reverence into his attitude toward its author. This was an easy transition, for he had never quite shaken off the rather frightened respect of the pupil for the schoolmaster. Then, to complete his infatuation, he contrasted Old Mole with his employer, Harbottle.

And Old Mole was fond of Panoukian. At first it was the sort of amused tenderness which it is impossible not to feel on the sight of a leggy colt in a field or a woolly kitten staggering after a ball. Then, by association and familiarity, it was enriched and became a thing as near friendship as there can be between men of widely different ages, between immaturity and ripeness. It saved the situation for both of them, the young man from his wildness, the older from the violent distortion of values which had become necessary if he were to move easily and comfortably in the swim. Above all, for Old Mole, it was amusing. For Panoukian nothing was amusing. In his intense longing for the "reality" of his dreams he hated amusement; he detested the vast expenditure of energy in the modern world on making existence charming and pleasant and comfortable, the elaborate ingenuity with which the facts of life were hidden and glossed over; he despised companionable books, and fantastical pictures and plays, luxurious entertainments, magazines filled with advertisements and imbecile love-stories, kinematographs, spectacular football, could not understand how any man could devote his energies to the creation of them and retain his sincerity and honesty. He adored what he called the English genius, and was disappointed and hurt because the whole of English life was not a spontaneous expression of it, and he found one of his stock examples in architecture. He would storm and inveigh against the country because the English architectural tradition had been allowed to lapse away back in the dark ages of the nineteenth century. He had many other instances of the obscuring or sudden obliteration of the fairest tendencies of the English genius, and to their mutual satisfaction, Old Mole would put it all down to his theory of the eruption of gold.

Nearly all Panoukian's leisure was spent at Gray's Inn or out with Old Mole and Matilda, or with them on their visits to those of their friends to whom they had introduced him. He was good-looking, well built, easily adept at ball-games--for he possessed a quick, sure eye--and his shy frankness made him likeable. The charm of English country life would soften his violence and soothe his prejudices, but only the more, when he returned to London, would he chafe against the incessant pursuit of material advantages, the mania of unselective acquisition, the spinning and droning of the many-colored humming-top.

From the first moment he had been Matilda's slave, and no trouble was too great, no time too long, no task too tedious, if only he could yield her some small service. He would praise her to Old Mole:

"She is so real. Compare her with other women. She does all the things they do, and does them better. She takes them in her stride. She can laugh with you, talk with you, understand what you mean better than you do yourself, give you just the little encouragement you need, and you can talk to her and forget that she is a woman. . . . You don't know, sir, what an extraordinary difference it has made in my life since I have known you two."

That would embarrass Old Mole, and he found it impossible to say anything without jarring Panoukian's feelings. Therefore he would say nothing, and later he would look at Matilda, watch her, wait for her smile, and wonder. Her smile was the most surprising, the most intimate gift he ever had from her. Often for days together they would hardly see each other and, when they met, would have little to say, but he would watch until he could meet her gaze, win a smile from her, and feel her friendliness, her interest, and know that they still had much to share and were still profoundly aware of each other. He would say to her sometimes:

"I don't see much of you nowadays."

She would answer:

"But you are so interested in so many things. And I like my life."

And in the gentle gravity with which she now spoke to him, which was in every gesture of her attitude toward him, he would discern a fuller grace than any he had hoped to find in her. She was so trim and neat, so well disciplined, so delicate and nice in all she did; restrained and subtle but with no loss of force. Even her follies, the absurd modish tricks she had caught in the theater and among the women who fawned on her, seemed no impediment to her impulse should the moment come for yielding to it. She was no more spendthrift of emotion and affection than she was of money, and, almost, he thought, too thorough in her self-effacement and endeavor to be no kind of burden upon him.

"I am so proud of you!" he would say.

And she would smile and answer:

"You don't know, you never will know, how grateful I am to you."

But her eyes would gaze far beyond him, through him, and light up wistfully, and he would have a queer discomfortable sensation of being a sojourner in his own house. Then he would think and puzzle over Panoukian's rapturous description of her. She was discreet and guarded: only her smile was intimate; her thoughts, if she had thoughts, were shy and never sought out his; demonstrative she never was. She led a busy, active life, the normal existence of moneyed or successful women in London, and she was distinguished in her efficiency. She had learned and developed taste, and was ever transforming the chambers in Gray's Inn, driving out Robert and installing in every corner of it the expression of her own personality. After the first dazzling discovery of the possibilities of clothes she had rebelled against the price charged by the fashionable dressmakers and made her own gowns. Robert used to twit her about her restlessness, and declared that one week when he came he would find her wearing the curtains, and the next her gown would be covering the cushions. Old Mole used to tease her, too, but what she would take quite amiably from Robert she could not endure from him.

"I thought you'd like it," she would say.

"But, my dear, I do like it!"

"Then why do you make fun of me?"

And sometimes there would be tears. Once it came to a quarrel, and after they had made it up she said she wanted a change, and went off to stay with Bertha Boothroyd. In two days she was back again with the most maliciously funny description of Jim's reception of her and his absolute refusal to leave her alone with Bertha lest she should be contaminated. Then she was gay and light-hearted, glad to be back again and more busy than ever, and when Panoukian came to see them she teased him out of his solemnity and earnestness almost into tears of rage. She told him he ought to go to Thrigsby and work, find some real work to do and not loaf about in London, in blue socks and white spats, waiting until he was old enough to be taken seriously.

He went away in the depths of misery, and she said to Old Mole:

"Why don't you find him something to do?"

"I? How can I find him. . . ?"

"Don't you know that you are a very important person? You know everybody who is anybody, and there is nobody you can't know if you want to. Think of the hundreds of men in London who spend their whole lives struggling to pull themselves up into your position so that in the end they may have the pleasure of jobbing some one into a billet."

"That," said Old Mole, "is what Panoukian calls Harbottling."

She made him promise to think it over, and he began to dream of a career for Panoukian, a real career on the lines of Self-Help.