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.
In his original pedagogic relation with Panoukian he had blocked out for him an ascent upon well-marked and worn steps through Oxford into the Home Civil Service, wherein by the proper gradations he should rise to be a Permanent Under-Secretary and a Knight, and a credit to the school. To the altered Panoukian and to Old Mole’s changed and changing mind that ambitious flight was now inadequate. Panoukian was undoubtedly intelligent. Old Mole had not yet discovered the idea that could baffle him, and he was positively reckless in his readiness to discard those which neither fitted into the philosophy he for the moment held nor seemed to lead to a further philosophy at which he hoped to arrive. Every day Panoukian became more youthful and every day more breathlessly irreverent. Nothing was sacred to him: he insisted on selecting his own great men, and Old Mole was forced to admit that there was some wisdom in his choice. He read Voltaire and hated organized religion; Nietzsche and detested the slothfulness and mean egoism of the disordered collection of human lives called democracy; Butler and quizzed at the most respected and dozing of English institutions; Dostoevsky and yearned out in a thinly passionate sympathy to the suffering and the diseased and the victims of grinding poverty. He was not altogether the slave of his great men: after all they were dead; life went on and did not repeat itself, and he (Panoukian) was in the thick of it, and determined not to be crushed by it into a cushioned ease or the sodden insensibility of too great misery.
“My problem,” he would say, “is myself. My only possible and valid contribution to any general problem is the effective solution of that. In other words, can I or can I not become a human being? If I succeed I help things on by that much; if I fail, I become a Harbottle and retard things by that much. Do you follow me?”
Old Mole was not at all sure that he did, but he found Panoukian refreshing, for there was in him something both to touch the affections and excite the mind, and in his immediate surroundings there was very little to do as much. There were men who talked, men who did little or nothing else; but they lacked warmth, they were Laputans living on a floating island above a land desolate in the midst of plenty. Among such men it was difficult to conceive of Panoukian finding a profitable occupation. Take him out of politics, and where could he be placed? For what had his education fitted him? Panoukian had had every kind of education. He had begun life in an elementary school, passed on by his own cleverness to a secondary school, and from that to the university where contact with the ancient traditions of English culture, manhood and citizenship had flung him into revolt and set him thinking about life before he had lived, braying about among philosophies before he had need of any. There was a fine stew in his brain, a tremendous array of ideas beleaguering Panoukian without there being any actual definite Panoukian to beleaguer. Certainly Old Mole could not remember ever having been in such a state himself, nor in any generation subsequent to his own could he remember symptoms which could account for the phenomenon. He had to look far to discover other Panoukians. They were everywhere, male and female. He set himself to discover them; they were in journalism, in science, in the schools of art, on the stage, writing wonderfully bad books, producing mannered and deliberately ugly verse, quarreling among themselves, wrangling, detesting each other, impatient, intolerant, outraging convention and their affectionate and well-meaning parents and guardians, united only in the one savage determination not to lick the boots of the generation that preceded them. When they could admire they worshiped; they needed to admire; they wanted to admire all men, and those men whom they found unadmirable they hated.