He awoke to a sense of novelty and unfamiliarity in his surroundings and in himself, welcomed the new day with the thankfulness of health, splashed lustily in his bath, jovially slapped his belly as he dried himself, and chuckled at its rotundity, regarded it as a joke, the private particular joke of middle age. Almost it seemed as though his body had a separate personality of its own, certainly it had many adventures, many inward happenings of which he was not aware, a variety of processes beyond his discernment. That amused him mightily. . . . He remembered the horrors of the night. It must have been a nightmare! Of course, a nightmare was often followed with a feeling of health and a grotesque humor!
There were three letters on his breakfast table. One was from Matilda, posted the day before at the Sussex village. She said she was well, though the weather was bad, and she was getting rather more loneliness than she had bargained for. She sent her love and hoped he was happy without her. He tore up the letter and burned it, and turned back the thoughts and memories it had summoned forth. He applied himself hungrily to his breakfast and took careful note of the process of eating, trying to discover why it should be pleasant and why, slowly, it should take the zest off his appetite for the day’s doings.
“Queer,” he thought, “how little interest we take in the body. It might be an unfailing source of entertainment. It is not so certain neither that it is not wiser than the mind.”
All day he harped on thoughts of the body and was fiercely busy scrubbing his own clean of the base ideas of the night. He was fairly rid of them at last toward evening, but his mind was in a horrid confusion, and he was rather alarmed at the hard appearance of actuality taken on by his body. It blotted everything else out. He saw it in the masked light and shade of dirt and cleanliness. From that he went on to the other seeming opposites—life and death, love and hate, vice and virtue, light and darkness—found so many of them that he was semi-hypnotized and sank into an unthinking contemplation. There was good and there was bad, two points, in the catenary of which he was slung as in a hammock, with the void beneath. . . . Life as an exact equation was an impossible, appalling idea; but he could not break free from it. He could not escape from the trite dualism of things. . . . From the stupor of ideas he returned to his body and found in that the same tyranny of the number two: he had two eyes, two ears, two hands, two feet, two lungs, two kidneys. It comforted him greatly to reflect that he had only one heart, one nose, one mouth.
“Bah!” he said, “I am making a bogey of my own shadow.”
And he resolved to take a Turkish bath before dining at the club. He did so, and was baked and kneaded and pummeled and lathered back into a tolerable humor, and, as he lay swathed in warm towels and smoking an excellent cigar, he faced the situation, yielded to it, let it sting and nip at his heart, and was so racked with its pain that he could form no clear idea of it, nor struggle, but only lie limp and pray to God, or whatever devil had let such furies loose upon him, that the worst might soon be over before he was betrayed into any brutal or foolish act. He was amazed to find that his vanity had been slain: it had died in the night of shock, so he diagnosed it. No longer was he concerned with what other people would think of himself. The cruel pain twinged the sharper for it, and he saw that vanity is a protective crust, a shell grown by man to cover his nakedness. . . . His general ideas were clear enough: and the amusement of them served to distract him in his agony. It tickled him to think of a Turkish bath in Jermyn Street as the scene of such a mighty sorrow, and said:
“So much the better for the Turkish bath. It becomes the equal of Troy or Elsinore or the palace of Andromache, and nobler, for mine is a real and no poet’s tragedy. It is a true tragedy, or, my vanity being dead, I should not bother my head about it. . . . Is my vanity dead? I have shed it as a crab his claw or a lizard his tail. It will grow again.”
He sank deep into pain until it seemed to him he could suffer no more, and then he went over to his club and dined fastidiously—a crab (to inspect its claw), a quail, and a devil on horseback, with a bottle of claret, very deliberately selected in consultation with the head waiter. Throughout his meal he read the wine list from cover to cover and back again, and thought how closely it resembled the Thrigsby school list. It contained so many familiar names that he was put out at its not including Panoukian’s, and of Panoukian slowly he began to think: at first sleepily and in the gross content of his good dinner, as a wine, heady, sparkling, inclined to rawness, too soon bottled, or too soon uncorked, he could not be certain which. Then he thought of Panoukian as a man, and a savage anger burst in upon him, and he thought of Panoukian’s deed as the atmosphere of the club dictated he should think of it. Panoukian had acted dirtily and dishonorably: he should be hounded out, hounded out. Panoukian had wormed himself into his (Old Mole’s) affections and trust, to betray both. He had shown himself a cad, a blackguard, a breaker of the laws of hospitality and good society. . . . There was a solid plumpness in this conception of Panoukian that pleased Old Mole almost sensually, gave him the same sort of mouth-watering anticipation as the breast had done of the quail he had just eaten. He had Panoukian nicely dished up, brown, done to a turn: he would poise the knife for one gloating moment, plunge it in, and cleave the ripe morsel from breast to back. Panoukian had been cooked by his own actions: he deserved the knife and the crunch of teeth. Old Mole, like many another good man wronged, felt ogreish. . . . He began in his head (and with the aid of the wine in his head) to compose letters to Panoukian, commencing “Sir” or “Dear Sir,” or, without approach, plunging into such a sentence as: “No matter how public the place, or how painful to myself, I shall, when I next meet you, be obliged to thrash you.”
And he gloated over the thoughts of thrashing Panoukian: mentally chose the stick, a whippy cane; the fleshy portion of Panoukian’s anatomy under the tails of his too-much-waisted coat. He rejoiced in the scene. It might be in the House, under the eyes of all the Harbottles: or, better still, in the Temple before the grinning porters.
He was brought to himself by a crash and a tinkle. He had waved his fork in the air and knocked over his last glass of claret. The head waiter concealed his annoyance in fatherly solicitude and professional business, and suggested another half-bottle. Weakly Old Mole consented, and while he was waiting, after collecting his thoughts, found that they had left Panoukian and come to Matilda. Her image was blurred: his love had become sorrow and a creeping torment, and the torment was Matilda, the blood in his veins, inseparable from himself. And because she was inseparable Panoukian became so, too. There could be no gain in thrashing Panoukian: that was just blustering nonsense; “defending his honor” was the phrase. Idiots! He looked round at the other diners. What was the good of defending that which was lost? What was there to defend? You might as well ask a sea captain whose ship had been blown up by a mine why on earth he did not use his guns. . . . Further, honor was a word for which he could find no precise meaning. It was much in vogue in the theater, from Copas to Butcher. A woman’s honor apparently meant her chastity. A man’s honor, in some very complicated way, seemed to be bound up in the preservation of woman’s, as though she herself were to have no say in the matter. No; honor would not do: it was only a red herring trailed across the scent.