He attended the first night of the new play. Matilda had a larger part, and one very short scene of emotion, or, at least, of what passed for it in the English theater of those days, that is to say it was a nervous and sentimental excitement altogether disproportionate to the action, and not built into the structure of the play, but plastered on to it to conceal an alarming crack in the brickwork. Matilda did very well and only for a moment let the scene slip out of the atmosphere of gimcrackery into the air of life. She did this through defective technique, but that one moment of genuine feeling, even in so false a cause, was so startling as to whip the audience out of its comfortable lethargy into something that was so near pleasure that they could not but applaud. It was an artistic error, since it was her business to be as banal and shallow as the play, which had been made with great mechanical skill so that it required only the superficial service of the actors, and, unlike the candle of the Lord, made no attempt to “search out the inward parts of the belly.” In her part Matilda had to discover and betray in one moment her love for the foppish hero of the piece, and being, as aforesaid, wanting in her technical equipment, drew, for the purpose of the scene, on her own imagination, and that which—though she might not know it—had possession of it. The audience was startled into pleasure, Old Mole into something like terror. There was in the woman there on the stage a power, a quality, an essence—he could not find the word—on which he had never counted, for which he had never looked, which now, he most passionately desired to make his own. He knew that it was not artistry in her, his own response to it had too profoundly shaken him; it was living fire, flesh of her flesh, and marvelously made her, for the first time, kin and kind with him. And he knew then that he had been living on theory about her, and was so contemptuous of it and of himself that he brushed aside all thought of the past, all musings and speculations, and was all eagerness to join her, to tell her of the amazing convulsion of himself, and how, at last, through this accident, he had recognized her for what she was. . . . He could not sit through the rest of the play. Its artificiality, its inane falsehood disgusted him. He went out into the brilliantly lighted streets and walked furiously up and down, up and down, and on. And the men and women in the streets seemed small and mechanical, utterly devoid of the vital principle he had discerned in his wife’s eyes, voice, gesture, as she played her part. They were just a crowd, mincing and strutting, bound together by nothing but the capacity to move, to place one leg before another and proceed from one point to another of the earth’s surface. He had that in common with them, but nothing else: nothing that bound him to them. (So he told himself, and so truly he thought, for he was comparing a moment of real experience with a series of impressions made on him by his surroundings.) He walked up and down the glittering streets, streaked with white and yellow and green and purple lights, and the commotion in him waxed greater. . . . When he returned to the theater Matilda was gone, and had left no message for him.
He found her in her bed, with the light on, reading. She had undressed hastily and her clothes were littered about the room in an untidiness most unusual with her. She stuffed what she was reading under her pillow.
“You didn’t wait for me,” he said.
“No. I didn’t want to see anybody. I rushed away before the end.”
“Anything wrong?”
“I hate the theater. I hate it all, the people in it, the blinding lights, the painted scenery, the audience, oh! the audience! I don’t ever want to go near it again. It’s just playing and pretending. . . .”
“The piece was certainly nothing but a pretence at drama.”
“Oh! Don’t talk about it.”
“But I want to know what has upset you.”
“I can’t tell you. I don’t know myself. I only know that I’m miserable, miserable. Just let me be.”