He stretched his legs and, with a beautiful sense of enunciating wisdom, he remarked:
“There is nothing to know, nothing to find out. Here are we, a man and a woman, fulfilling the destiny of men and women, and, for the rest, happy enough in the occupation to which circumstances and our several destinies and characters have brought us. I am perfectly happy, my dear, most surprisingly happy when I look back and consider all things. I have no ambition, no hopes, and, I fancy, no illusions; most happily of all, I have no politics. I did not make the world and I do not believe that I can undo anything good or evil which, for the world’s purposes, is necessary to be done. . . .”
He had developed a habit of talking and did not know it. She had taken refuge in silence and was aware of it.
Once she asked him if he did not feel the want of friends.
“Friends?” he answered. “I want nothing while I have you.”
She made no reply and he was left hurt, because he had expected appreciation of his entire devotion.
She was happy, too, but more keenly than he, for she was a little dazed by her astounding luck, and behind her pleasure in him and his unfailing kindness and consideration lay the sting of uneasiness and the dread that the comfort of such charming days could not last. Ignorant, untaught, unprepared, love had been for her a kiss of the lips, a surrender to the flood of perilous feeling, a tampering with forces that might or might not sweep you to ruin: a matter of fancy, dalliance, and risk. She had fancied, dallied, dared, and when she had thought to be swept to ruin—and that swift descent also had had its sickening fascination—she had been tumbled into this security where love was solid, comfortable, omnipresent, and apparently all providing. She was perpetually amazed at her husband and chafed only against herself because she could not share his complacency. It was easy for her to assimilate his manners and to take the measure of his refinement. With talk of her brothers and sisters she would lead him on to tell of his family, and especially of the women among whom he had spent his boyhood, and she would contrast herself with them and rebel against everything in herself that was not harmonious with their atmosphere. And she found it increasingly difficult to get on with her aunt, Mrs. Copas.
The new comic, John Lomas, was a great success. He was a fat little man in the fifties with a thorough knowledge of his business, which was to make any and every kind of audience laugh. A wonderful stock of tricks he had, tricks of voice, of limbs, of gesture, of facial expression, nothing but tricks, inexhaustible. He cared about nothing in the world but what he called “the laugh,” and when he got one he wanted another, and always had a quip or a leer or a cantrip to get it. But he was a rascal and a drunkard, and had lost all sense of the fitness of things and always went on too long until his audience was weary of him. Therefore he had come down and down until he found an appetite to feed that was gross enough to bear with his insistence. . . . He said—it may have been true—that he had played before the King of England, and he was full of stories of the theaters in London, the real nobby theaters where the swells paid half a guinea for a seat and brought their wives and other people’s wives in shining jewels and dresses cut low back and front. He had played in every kind of piece, from the old-fashioned kind of burlesque to melodrama, drama, and Shakespeare, and he had never had any luck, but had always been on the point of making a fortune. “Charley’s Aunt,” he said, had been offered to him, and he had taken an option, but at the last moment his backers failed him. “And look at the money that had made and was still making.” His first stage of intoxication was melancholy, and then he would weep over the mess he had made of his life and grow maudlin and tell how badly he had treated the dear little woman who had been his wife so that she had left him and gone off with a bloody journalist. When that mood passed he would grow excited and blustering, and brag of the slap-up women he had had when he was making his thirty pounds a week. His most intimate confessions were reserved for Matilda, for he despised Copas because he had never known anything better than a fit-up. And of Mr. Mole he was rather scared.
“I don’t know,” he would say to Matilda. “I don’t know what it is, but your guv’nor ain’t one of us, is he now?”
And when Matilda agreed that Mr. Mole was different he called her a silly cuckoo for not making him take her to London and the Continong to have a high old time.