VI
OUT OF IT
THE name acted as an aperitive on Old Mole’s faculties, he opened his eyes and mouth very wide and ate his breath like a fish, and began eloquently to apologize to the policemen for the trouble he had given them. He diagnosed his condition as a brief suspension of the reasoning faculties, a perfectly normal affliction to which all men were liable. The policemen listened to him stolidly and exchanged slow, heavy winks, as to say that they had indeed drawn a strange fish out of the sea of London. Their prize was soon able to give a coherent account of himself, and they let him go with no worse than a request to pay the cost of the cab in which he had been brought.
There was heavy rain when he reached the streets. The people were coming out of the theaters and halls, scurrying along under umbrellas, darting for cover, wrestling their way into cabs and omnibuses and Tube stations. The streets were like black mirrors, or deep sluggish rivers, with the lights drowned in them. The people were all hurrying to get out of the rain. Old Mole was indifferent to it, and more acutely than ever was he visited by the sense of having nothing in common with them. By sheer force of numbers they presented themselves to his mind as obscene. At one point he was caught in a crowd and so offended by the smell of warm flesh, wet clothes and heated india rubber that he was for a moment possessed by a desire to strike the nearest man. He restrained himself and walked on. In front of him there were a brace of marketable women profiting by the weather to display their legs up to their knees. His mind raced back to the Puritanism in which he had been nurtured, and he was filled with the Antonine heated horror of women. . . . All the way home he was beset with sights and scenes that accentuated his disgust.
It was not until he reached Gray’s Inn that he was faced with the pathetic absurdity of his situation, and then he found it unthinkable. There was not an object in the chambers but cried aloud of Matilda. She had made the place beautiful, changed its tone from masculine to feminine, and she was there though she was absent. It was very grim and horrible; like coming on the clothes of a beloved creature of whose death he had been told. He played with the idea of death voluptuously. She was dead, he told himself; his own end was not far off. The shadow of it was over the place. He went from room to room, fingering her possessions, touching the stuffs and garments he had last seen in her hands. He opened her wardrobe and thrust his hands among her soft gowns. He stood by her bed and patted the pillow and smoothed the coverlet. He caught sight of himself in her mirror and told himself that he could see her face, too. And she was very young, too young to be dead: and he was startlingly, haggardly old. Surely the end could not be far off.
He went from room to room, picturing her in each as he had last seen her.
He pushed his mood of horror to its extremity so that he was nigh sick with it.
All night in his study he prowled round and round. He locked himself in, locked the outer door, locked all her rooms and pocketed the keys. She would not, she should not, come back. No one should enter. The obscenity of the streets clung to him and he could see his situation in no other light. All his life he had regarded the violation of marriage as a thing so horrible that it could only happen among monsters and therefore so remote from himself as to find no place in his calculations. There was a certain side of human life which was settled by marriage. Outside it was obscenity, from the poison of which marriages were impregnably walled in. The walls were broken down; a filthy flood swamped the fair city of his dreams, and for a short while he was near mad with thoughts of lust and jealousy and revenge. He knew it but could not away with it. There was an extraordinary pleasure, a giddy delight in yielding to the flood, giving rein to the long penned up forces of the animal in him, and breaking into childish, impotent anger.
Slowly he lingered, and he began to imagine, to invent, what others would think of him—Robert, his sister, his acquaintances at the club, and there was a sort of pleasure in the writhing of his vanity. He despised himself for it, but he wallowed in it. Never before had he seen such a quantity of mud and its appeal was irresistible.
When at last he crawled out of it he sat in rueful contemplation of himself and went back to the cause of it all: the averted accident in Trafalgar Square, the hotel door swinging—the low-hanging clouds, the crowd, the Nelson statue. . . . Nelson: Emma. And Old Mole laughed: after all, there were distinguished precedents, Sir William Hamilton, most of the friends of Julius Cæsar, Hans von Bülow, George II. The thing had happened even in Thrigsby, but there it had been only a tale to laugh at, with pitying condemnation for the husband and a sudden, irrepressible envy of the lover; envy, neither more nor less; he felt gratified at the honesty of this admission, though not a little surprised at it. It was like a thin trickle of cold water upon his fever, invigorating him, so that he struggled to break through the meshes of sentimentality in which he had been caught. He broke free, and to his astonishment found himself sitting at his desk and turning over the closely written sheet which he had left on the blotting pad. He corrected a serious mistake in the topography of Trafalgar Square and went on writing. . . . The outcry of the women against the moral atmosphere of the sand heap reached up to a noble eloquence in which were declared their profound pity and sympathy for the men trapped in sensuality and habitual vice. They declared their ability to think of men as suffering human beings, wounded and deformed by ignorance and prejudice, and asked only for the like true chivalry from men. He drained the vat of his ideas dry, and, at last, at five o’clock in the morning, exhausted, he went to bed.