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.