It was all very well (thought Old Mole) for Matilda with her cool common sense to say that Panoukian must do something. What could he do? His only positive idea seemed to be that he would not become a Harbottle; and how better could he set about that than by living among the species with the bitterness of his hatred sinking so deep into his soul that in the end it must become sweetness? In theory Panoukian was reckless and violent; in practice he was affectionate and generous, much too full of the spasmodic, shy kindness of the young to fit into the Self-Help tradition. Indeed, it was just here that the Panoukians, male and female, were so astonishing. For generations in England personal ambition had been the only motive force, the sole measure of virtue, and it was personal ambition that they utterly ignored. They were truly innocent of it. Upon that axis the society in which they were born revolved. They could not move with it, for it seemed to them stationary, and it was abhorrent to them. Their thoughts were not the thoughts of the people around them. They could neither speak the old language nor invent a new speech in which to make themselves understood. Virtue they could perceive in their young hunger for life, but virtue qualified by personal ambition and subserving it they could not understand. They were asking for bread and always they were offered stones. . . . Old Mole could not see what better he could do than be kind to Panoukian, defend him from his solitude and give him the use of the advantages in the “swim” of London which he had no mind himself to employ.
One of the few definite and tangible planks in Panoukian’s program was a stubborn conviction that he must have an “idea” of everything. It was, he insisted, abominable to live in London unless there was in his mind a real conception of London.
“You see,” he would say, “it would be charming and pleasant to accept London as consisting of the Temple, the House and Gray’s Inn, with an imperceptible thread of vitality other than my own to bind them together. We’ve had enough of trying to make life charming and pleasant. All that is just swinish rolling in the mud. Do you follow me? We’ve had enough. We were begotten and conceived and born in the mud, and we’ve got to get out of it; and, unless you see that mud is mud, you can’t see the hills beyond, and the clear rivers, and the sky. Can you?”
“No, you can’t,” said Old Mole, groping about in his incoherence, and speaking only because Panoukian was waiting for a shove into his further speculations.
“I mean, London may be all in a mess, which it is, but if I haven’t a clear idea of the mess I can’t begin to mop it up, and I can’t begin on it at all until I’ve cleaned up the bit of the mess that is in myself, can I? I mean, take marriage, for instance.”
“By all means, take marriage.”
“Well, you’re married and I’m not, but it isn’t a bit of good screaming about marriage unless your own marriage is straightened out and,—you know what I mean?—understood, is it? . . .”
So he would go on, whirling from one topic to another—marriage, morals, democracy, the will to power,—thinking in sharp contrasts, sometimes hardly thinking, but feeling always. Vaguely, without objects, catching himself out in some detestable sentimentality, admitting it frankly and going back again over his whole argument to pluck it out. Panoukian was to himself a weedy field, and with bowed back and stiffened loins he was engrossed in stubbing it. It was exhausting to watch him at it, and when, as sometimes happened, Old Mole saw things through Panoukian’s eyes he was disquieted. Then there seemed no security in existence; civilization was no longer an achievement, but a fluid stream flowing over a varied bed—rock, pebbles, mud, sand; society was no establishment, but a precarious, tottering thing, a tower of silted sands with an oozy base, blocking the river, squeezing it into a narrow and unpleasant channel. In the nature of things and its law the river would one day gather unto itself great waters and bear the sands away. . . . Meanwhile men strove to make the sand heap habitable, for they were born on it, lived and died on it, and never looked beyond. Their whole lives were filled with dread of its crumbling, their whole energies devoted to building up against it and against the action of wind and rain and sun. They built themselves in and looked not out, and made their laws by no authority but only by expediency. And the young men, in their vitality too great for such confinement, knew that somewhere there must be firm ground, and were determined to excavate and to explore. And Old Mole wished them well in the person of Panoukian.
That young man set himself to discover London. He was forever coming to Gray’s Inn with exciting tales of streets discovered down by the docks or in the great regions of the northern suburbs. He set himself to walk from end to end of it, from Ealing to West Ham, from Dulwich to Tottenham, and he vowed that there were men really living in it, and he began to think of the democracy as a real entity, to be exalted at the thought of its power. Old Mole demurred. The democracy had no power, since it knew not how to grasp it. Its only instrument was the vote, which was the engine of the Harbottles, the nibblers, the place-seekers, the pleasure-hunters, those who scrambled to the top of the sandy tower, where in the highest cavern there were at least air and light and only the faintest stench from the river’s mud. Here there was so much divergence between Old Mole and Panoukian that they ceased to talk the same language, and Old Mole would try another tack and reach the stop-gap conclusion that the difference came about from the fact that Gray’s Inn was very comfortable, while Panoukian’s chambers in the Temple were bleak and bare. That was unsatisfactory, for Panoukian would inveigh against comfort and vow, as indeed was obvious, that no one had yet devised a profitable means of spending a private income of thirty thousand a year. After reading an economic treatise he came to the conclusion that the whole political problem resolved itself into the wages question. Old Mole hated problems and questions. They parched his imagination. His whole pleasure in Panoukian’s society lay in the young man’s power to flood ideas with his vitality. He argued on economic lines and gradually forced the young man up to the spiritual plane and then gave him his conception of society as a sand heap. That fired Panoukian. Was it or was it not necessary for human beings to live upon shifting ground, with no firm foothold? And he said that the great men had been those who had gone out into the world and brought back tales of the fair regions contained therein.