He went to fetch her from the theater. The stagedoor lay at the back in an alley joining two great thoroughfares. As he entered the alley from one end he saw Matilda and Panoukian leave by the other, and he had his arm in hers. Old Mole turned, with the fluttering sense of an escape, glad not to have met them. And when he had controlled himself he was amused to think that they could not have dreaded the encounter more than he.
He took a long walk to delay his return, and when he reached the chambers they were in darkness. He crept softly down the little stairs and tried her door. It was locked.
In a moment’s panic he thought that this time she had really “cut and run,” and he was almost stunned with his terror of it. It was too soon, too soon: it would be disastrous; he would be left without understanding, to the mercy of the obsession; he had not all the threads in his hands; until he had, it would be rash folly to snap. He stood against her door, with his ear to the panel, holding his breath, straining to hear. There were explosive noises in the house. From the room he could catch nothing for them. Closer and closer he pressed to the door, his ear against the panel. He lurched and the panel creaked. Silence. He heard her stir in her bed.
She was there! That was all he wanted to know. On tiptoe he crept away. . . . She was there! He would yet gather all the threads and then he or she would snap. One or other would be broken.
What had he then? The evidence of his own eyes. Was that not enough? It was enough for prescribed remedies, to which he could not resort without revenge, for which he had not now the least desire. What his eyes had seen was so isolated, so severed from the rest of his life as to be monstrous and injurious. By itself it was damnable harlotry. (There was a sort of boyish satisfaction in fishing out the words of a grosser age with which to bespatter it and make it even more offensive to pure-mindedness.) But, as he loved the woman, it could not stand by itself. He was in it, too. Actions cannot be judged by themselves. There must have been an antecedent conspiracy of circumstance and fault to lead to such misdemeanor.
With a tight control of himself he could now almost think of it without jealousy (hardly any of that was left but the quick, shallow jealousy of the brute), but he could not think of it without passion, and through that he could discern its inherent passion and, faintly, respond to it. That put an end to all mean suspicions of a conspiracy against himself, or of cowardly contriving to enjoy stolen fruit and leave no trace. . . . She had locked the door against him. So much was definite, and he had a sort of envying admiration for her that she could be precise while he was still floundering and groping for understanding. . . . Certainly he had never seen her so sure of herself.
But then, if she were so sure, why did she not “cut and run.” Then it would not be so bad. For a flash he saw the thing with the eyes of a fat clubman; the passion in him ebbed and he lost grip, and blundered into a mist. A lunge forward cleared him. She was sure of herself, so sure that she was giving no thought to her position except as it immediately presented itself. The new factor in her life called for no change, and everything she had was enriched by it, her possessions, her work, even her domestic life. It must all seem to her clear gain, and therefore she was sure. She loved her love, and everything that had led to it, and therefore she was sure.
From that flight upward Old Mole came to the sensation of falling. He was possessed by a prevision, felt that in a moment he would see all things plain, would know exactly what was going to happen. He strained forward, felt sleep overcoming him, struggled against it, and fell asleep.
Then Matilda was busy all day rehearsing, and, during the little time he had with her, she talked the slang and gossip of the theater. Once she asked after the work, and he read a little of it to her, and she liked it and he plucked up courage to go on with it. She laughed at his cuts at women and admitted that he had thrust home at more than one of her own foibles. He had written part of a chapter on the Theater as Education. She could make nothing of that. The theater to her was a place in which you played “parts,” sometimes good and sometimes bad, and you were always waiting for the supreme, all-conquering “part” to turn up. She did what she was asked to do to the very best of her ability; that was her work and she did not look beyond it. The flattering side of London, its pleasures, fashions and functions had fallen into the background and she gave it just the attention which her interest seemed to demand. It never struck her as strange that she should be given no more of a play than her own part to read, and if she had been given the play would probably not have read it. She learned her part, movements and gestures, cues during rehearsal, and never watched any scene in which she did not appear.
By her part in the “intellectual” play she was mystified. None of her Copas or Butcher tricks were in the least suited to it. She had an enormous part to learn: all talk, gibes at marriage, and honor, and wealth, and domesticity, all the fetishes of the theater in which she was beginning to find her footing. The manager of the theater was his own producer; he had chosen her because she looked the part, “the rising temperament,” he called it, and he added to her bewilderment with the invention of elaborate detail to break the flood of talk, and, in the absence of action, to bind the play together. Everyone in that theater spoke of the play with awe, so she concealed her perplexity and brought it to Old Mole.