Old Mole / Being the Surprising Adventures in England of Herbert Jocelyn Beenham, M.A., Sometime Sixth-Form Master at Thrigsby Grammar School in the County of Lancaster

by Gilbert Cannan

He had learned that when she was ill or out of sorts or depressed she never had any desire left in her but to curl up and hide herself away. At such times the diffidence inherent in her character seemed wholly to master her, and there was no rousing her to a better grace. He withdrew, his exaltation dampened, and repaired to his study, where in the dark at his desk in the window he sat gazing out into the night, at the few lighted windows of the Inn, and the bruise-colored glow of the sky. He could think only of her and now it seemed to him that he could really lose himself and live in her, and through her come to love. He remembered how, when she was rehearsing, he had asked how she was progressing, and she had replied: “I shall never get it. Either the part’s all wrong or I am.” And that evening she had “got it,” reached what the author had been fumbling after, the authentic note of human utterance, the involuntary expression of love. It had alarmed himself: how devastating must it then have seemed to her! It was almost horrible in its irrelevance. It came from neither of them and yet it was theirs, but not for sharing. It had driven her, like a beast on a stroke of illness, to hide away from him, but through her and only through her could he approach it. The abruptness of its outburst, its geyser-like upward thrust, made it alone seem natural and all their life of habit artificial and shabby; how much more then the stale and outworn tricks of the theater! He approached it, worshiping, marveling at the sense of release in his soul, and knew that, with the power it gave him, he had bitten through the crust of life, whereat he had been nibbling and gnawing with his mind and picking with the chipped flints of philosophies. And he was awed into humility, into admission of his own impotence, into perception, clear and whole, of the immensity of its life’s purpose, of its huge force and mighty volume bearing the folly and turbulence of mind and flesh lightly on its bosom, so that a man must accept life as to be lived, can never be its master, but only its honorable servant or its miserable slave. He had then the sense of being one with life, from which nothing was severed, not the smallest bubble of a thought, not the least grain of a desire, of possessing all his force and a boundless reserve of force, and he whispered:

“I love.”

And the mighty sound of it filled all the chambers of his life, so that he was rich beyond dreams.

He laid his head in his arms and wept. His tears washed away the stains of memory, the scars and spotted dust upon his soul, and he knew now that he had no longer to deal with an idea of life, but with life itself, and he was filled with the desperate courage of his smallness.

For a brief space after a storm of summer rain the world is a place of glowing color, of flowing, harmonious lines. So it was now with Old Mole, and he discovered the charm of things. His habitual life went on undisturbed, and he could find pleasure even in that. His love for Matilda reduced him to a sort of passiveness, so that he asked nothing of her, gave her of himself only so much as she demanded, and was content to watch her, to be with her, to feel that he was in no way impeding her progress.

She showed no change save that there was a sort of effort in her self-control, as though she were deliberately maintaining her old attitude toward him. She never made any further allusion to her avowed hatred of the theater, and returned to it as though nothing had suffered. He told himself that it was perhaps only a mood of exhaustion, or that, though she might have passed through a crisis, yet it was possible for her to be unaware of it, so that its effects would only gradually become visible and very slowly translated into action. After all, she was still very young, and the young are mercifully spared having to face their crises. . . . When he went to see her play her part again she had mastered her scene by artistry; the almost barbaric splendor of her outburst was gone; she had a trick for it, and her little scene became, as it was intended to be, only a cog in the elaborate machinery by which the entertainment moved.

This time Panoukian was with him, and denounced the piece as an abomination, a fraud upon the public—(who liked it immensely)—and he produced a very ingenious, subtle diagnosis of the diseases that were upon it and submitted it to a thorough and brutal vivisection, act by act, as they sat through it. Old Mole was astonished to find that Panoukian’s violence annoyed him, offended him as an injustice, and, though he did not tell him so, saw clearly that he was applying to the piece a standard which had never for one moment been in the mind of the author, whose concern had been to the best of his no great powers to contrive an amusing traffic which should please everybody and offend none, supply the leading actors with good and intrinsically flattering parts, tickle the public into paying for its long-continued presentation, and so pay the rent of the theater, the formidable salary list, and provide for the satisfaction of his pleasures, the caprices of his extremely expensive wife, and his by no means peculiar mania for appearing in the columns of the newspapers and illustrated journals; pure Harbottling; but it had nothing at all to do with what Panoukian was talking about, namely, art. It was certainly all out of drawing and its moral perspective was all awry, but it was hardly more fantastical and disproportionate than Panoukian’s criticism. It was entirely unimportant: to apply a serious standard to it was to raise it to a level in the mind to which it had no right. Of the two, the author and Panoukian, he was not sure but Panoukian was the greater fool. However, extending his indulgence from one to the other, he let the young man talk his fill, and said nothing. He had begun to treasure silence.

He loved the silent evenings in Gray’s Inn, where he could sit and smoke and chuckle over the world’s absurdity, and ponder the ways of men so variously revealed to him in the last few years, and gloat over his own happiness and dream of the days when Matilda should have come to the full bloom of her nature and they would perfectly understand each other, and then life would be a full creation, as full and varied, as largely moving as the passing of the seasons. He had delightful dreams of the time when she would fully share his silence, the immense region beyond words. He was full of happiness, gummy with it, like a plum ripe for plucking—or falling.

In his fullness of living—the very top, he told himself, of his age, of a man’s life—he found it easy to cover paper with his thoughts and memories, delightful and easy to mold them into form, and to amuse himself he began a work which he called “Out of Bounds,” half treatise, half satire on education, dry, humorous, mocking, in which he drew a picture of the members of his old profession engaged in hacking down the imaginations of children and feeding the barren stumps of their minds with the sawdust of the conventional curricula. He was very zestful in this employment, perfectly content that Matilda should be even less demonstrative than before, telling himself that she was wrestling with the after effects of her crisis and would turn to him and his affection when she needed them. He made rapid progress with his work.

“Lossie Loses” came to an end at last, and he counted the spoils. He had gained many thousands of pounds—(the play was still running in America)—a few amusing acquaintances, a career for his wife, and an insight into the workings of London’s work and pleasure which he would have found it hard to come by otherwise. He chuckled over it all and flung himself with fresh ardor into his work.