WHEN the pantomime came to an end (as it did before a packed house, that cheered and cheered again and insisted on speeches from the comedians and the principal boy and the principal girl, and went on cheering regardless of last trains and trams and closing time) Matilda was told that, if she liked and if she had nothing better to do, she could return again next year. She declared her pleasure at the prospect, but inwardly determined to have something a great deal better to do. She had drawn blood from the public and was thirsting for more of it. Her condition was one with which Old Mole was destined to become familiar, but now he was distressed by her excitement, insisted that she was tired (she looked it), and decided on a holiday. She would only consent on condition that he allowed her to take singing lessons and would pay for them. Still harping on economy—for she could not get the extent and fertility of his means into her head—she pitched on Blackpool because she had a sort of cousin there who kept lodgings and would board them cheap. He tried to argue with her, and suggested London or Paris. But London had become to her the heaven to which all good “professionals” go, and Paris was very little this side of Hell for wickedness, and her three months in the theater had had the curious result of making her set great store by her estate as a married woman. To Blackpool they went and were withered by the March winds and half starved by Matilda’s cousin, who despised them when she learned that they were play actors. They were miserable, and for misery no worse setting could be found than an empty pleasure city. They frequented the theater, and very quickly Matilda made friends with its permanent officials and arranged for her singing lessons with the conductor of the orchestra, who was also organist of a church and eked out a meager living with instruction on the violin, ’cello, piano, organ, flute, trombone, tympani, voice production and singing—(all this was set forth on his card, which he left on Old Mole by way of assuring himself that all was as it should be and he would be paid for his trouble). Matilda had four lessons a week, and she practiced most industriously. “It was not,” said her instructor, “as though she were training for op’ra, but just to get the voice clear and refine it. . . .” He was very genteel, was Mr. Edwin Watts, and he did more for her pronunciation in a week than Old Mole had been able to accomplish in a year and more. His gentility discovered the gentleman in his pupil’s husband, and he invited them to his house, and gave them tickets for concerts and the Tower and a series of organ recitals he was giving in his church. He was a real musician, but he was alone in his music, for he had an invalid wife who looked down on his profession and would admit none of his friends to the house, which she filled with suites of furniture, china knickknacks, lace curtains and pink ribbons. The little man lived in perpetual distrust of himself, admired his wife because he loved her, and submitted to her taste, regarding his own as a sort of unregenerate longing. Neither Old Mole nor Matilda were musical, but, when his wife was out to tea with the wife of the bank manager or the chemist, Watts would invite them to his parlor and play the piano—Bach, Beethoven, Chopin—until they could take in no more and his music was just a noise to them. But there was no exhausting his capacity or his energy, and when they were thoroughly worn out he used to play “little things of his own.” He was very religious and full of cranks, a great reader of the advertisements in the newspapers, and there was no patent medicine, hair restorer, magnetic belt, uric acid antidote that he had not tried. He was proud of it, and used to say:
“I’ve tried ’em all except the bust preservers.”
It was precisely here that he and Old Mole found common ground. With his new mental activity Old Mole had become increasingly sensitive to any sluggishness in his internal organs and began to resent his tendency to fleshiness. He and Mr. Watts had immense discussions, and the musician produced remedies for every ailment and symptom.
Matilda said they were disgusting, but Old Mole stuck to it, smoked less, ate less, took long walks in the morning, and attained a ruddiness of complexion, a geniality of manner, a sense of wellbeing that helped him, with surprising suddenness, to begin to enjoy his life, to delight in its little pleasures, and to laugh at its small mischances and irritations. With a chuckling glee he would watch Matilda in her goings out and her comings in, and he preferred even her assiduous practicing to her absence. He was amazed at the swiftness with which, on the backward movement of time, his past life was borne away from him, with his anxieties, his unrest, his bewilderment, his repugnance in the face of new things and new people. He found that he was no longer shy with other men, nor did he force them to shyness. He lost much of his desire to criticize and came by a warm tolerance, which saved him from being conscious of too many things at once and left him free to exist or to live, as the case might be. He felt ready for anything.
When, therefore, Matilda announced that Mr. Watts had procured her an engagement with a No. 2 Northern Musical Comedy Company, touring, “The Cinema Girl” and “The Gay Princess,” he packed up his traps, told himself that he would see more of this astonishing England, and went with her. She had two small parts and was successful in them. And now, when she was in the theater, he no longer skulked in their lodgings nor divided her existence into two portions—his and the theater’s, but went among the company, joined in their fare and jokes and calamities, played golf with the principal comedian and the manager, and saw things with their eyes. This was easy, because they saw very little. They liked and respected him, and soon discovered that he had money. Matilda’s lot was made comfortable and her parts were enlarged. Neither she nor her husband attributed this to anything but her talent, and it made them very happy. Her name was on the program, and they cut out all the flattering references to her in the newspapers and pasted them into a book, and it were hard to tell which read them the oftener, he or she. He felt ready for everything, expanded like a well-tended plant; but with his unrest had gone much of his sympathy and the tug and tear of his heart on the sight of misery. He watched men now as they might be dolls, pranked up and tottering, flopping through their daily employments, staggeringly gesticulating through anger and love, herding together for pleasure and gain, and when both were won (or avoided), lurching into their own separate little houses. In this mood it pleased him to be with the dolls of the theater, because they were gayer than the rest, farded, painted, peacocking through their days. He caught something of their swagger, and, looking at the world through their eyes, saw it as separate from himself, full of dull puppets, bound to one place, caught in a mesh of streets, while from week to week he moved on. The sense of liberty, of having two legs where other men were shackled, was potent enough to carry him through the traveling on Sundays, often all day long, with dreary waits at empty, shuttered stations, and blinded him to the small miseries, the mean scandals, the jealousies, rivalries and wounded sensibilities which occupied the rest of the company. . . . There was one woman—she was perhaps forty-five—who sat opposite to him on three consecutive Sundays. She played, in both pieces, the inevitable dowager to chaperone the heroine; she was always knitting, and, with brows furrowed, she stared fixedly in front of her; her lips were always moving, and every now and then she would nod her head vigorously, or she would stop and stare desperately, and put her hands to her lips and her heart would leap to her mouth. At first Old Mole thought she was counting the stitches; but once, in the train, she laid aside her knitting and produced a roll of cloth and cut out a pair of trousers. Her lips went more furiously than ever, and suddenly her eyes stared and she held out her hand with the scissors as though to ward off some danger. Old Mole leaned across and spoke to her, but she was so taken up with her own thoughts that she replied:
“Yes, it’s better weather, isn’t it?” jerked out a watery smile and withdrew into herself. When Old Mole asked Matilda why the woman counted her stitches even when she was not knitting, and why, apparently, she dropped so many stitches when she was, Matilda told him that the woman had lost her voice and her figure and could make very little money, and had a husband who was a comedian, the funniest fellow in the world off the stage, but when he was “on” all his humor leaked away, and though he worked very hard no one laughed at him, and he, too, made very little money. They had six children, and all the time in the train the woman was making calculations. She often borrowed money, but that only added to her perplexity, because she could not bear not to pay it back.
This story almost moved Old Mole, but his mood was too strong for him, and the woman only came forward to the foreground of the puppet show, a sort of link between the free players, the colored, brilliant dolls, and the drab mannikins who lived imprisoned in the background.
His was a very pleasant mood to drift in and lounge and taste the soothing savor of irony, which dulls sharp edges and tempers the emphasis of optimism or pessimism. It seems to deliver the soul from its desire for relief and sops its hunger with a comfortable pity. But it is a lie. Old Mole knew it not for what it was and hugged it to himself, and called it wisdom, and he began to write a satire on education as he had known it in Thrigsby. He reveled in the physical labor of writing, in the company of his ideas as they took shape in the furnace of concentration, and what he had intended to be a short pamphlet grew into an elaborate account of his twenty-five years of respectable and respected service, showing the slow submergence of the human being into the machine evolved for the creation of other machines. . . . He was weeks and months over it. The tour did not come to an end as had been anticipated, but was continued through the holiday months at the seaside resorts. They returned to Blackpool in August, and then he finished his work and read it to Edwin Watts. The musician had an enormous reverence for the printed word, and had never met an author before. His emotionalism warmed up and colored the dryness and bitterness of Old Mole’s tale, and he saw in it only a picture of suppression and starved imagination like his own. He applauded, and Old Mole was proud of his firstborn and determined to publish it. In his early days he had revised and prepared a book of Examination Papers in Latin accidence for a series, and to the publisher he sent his “Syntax and Sympathy.” It had really moved Edwin Watts, and he composed in its honor a sonata in B flat, which he dedicated “To the mute, inglorious Miltons of Lancashire.” It was played on the pier by a municipal band, but did not immediately produce any ebullition of genius.
When Old Mole told Matilda that he had written a book she asked: