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His star is a strange one! One that leadeth him to fortune by the path of frowns! to greatness by the aid of thwackings!

THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT

I

PRELUDE

A SENSITIVE observer, who once spent a week in theatrical lodgings in Thrigsby, has described the moral atmosphere of the place as “harsh listlessness shot with humor.” That is about as far as you can get in a week. It is farther than Herbert Jocelyn Beenham, M.A. (Oxon.), got in the twenty-five years he had given to the instruction of the youth of Thrigsby in its Grammar School—the foundation of an Elizabethan bishop. Ambition ever leads a man away from Thrigsby. Having none, H. J. Beenham had stayed there, achieving the sort of distinction that swelled Tennyson’s brook. Boys and masters came and went, but “Old Mole” still occupied the Sixth Form room in the gallery above the glass roof of the gymnasium.

He was called Old Mole because whenever he spied a boy cribbing, or larking, or reading a book that had no reference to the subject in hand, or eating sweets, or passing notes, he would cry out in a voice of thunder: “Ha! Art thou there, old mole?” Thrigsbian fathers who had suffered at his hands would ask their sons about Old Mole, and so his position was fortified by a sort of veneration. He was one of those men who assume their definite shape and appearance in the early thirties, and thereafter give no clew to their age even to the most curious spinster’s inquisitiveness. Reference to the Calendar of his university shows that at the time of his catastrophe he cannot have been more than forty-eight.

He was unmarried, not because he disliked women, but from indolence, obstinacy, combativeness, and a coarse strain in him which made him regard the female body, attire and voice as rather ridiculous. With married women he was ceremonious and polite: with the unmarried he was bantering. When he had been twenty years at the school he began jocularly to speak of it as his bride, and when he came to his twenty-fifth year he regarded it as his silver wedding. He was very proud when his Form presented him with a smoker’s cabinet and his colleagues subscribed for a complete edition of the works of Voltaire bound in vellum. Best of all was the fact that one of his boys, A. Z. Panoukian, an Armenian of the second generation (and therefore a thorough Thrigsbian), had won a scholarship at Balliol, the first since he had had charge of the Sixth. At Speech Day, when the whole school and their female relatives and the male parents of the prize-winners were gathered in the John Bright Hall, the Head Master would make a special reference to Panoukian and possibly to the happy coincidence of his performance with the attainment of Mr. Beenham’s fourth of a century in the service of the pious and ancient foundation. It was possible, but unlikely, for the Head Master was a sentimentalist who made a point of presenting an arid front to the world lest his dignity should be undermined.

It was with a glow of satisfaction that H. J. Beenham took out his master’s hood and his best mortar-board on the eve of Speech Day and laid them out in his bedroom. This was at five o’clock in the afternoon, for he had promised to spend the evening with the Panoukian family at Bungsall, on the north side of the city. It was a heavy July day and he was rather tired, for he had spent the morning in school reading aloud from the prose works of Emerson, and the afternoon had been free, owing to the necessity of a replay of the Final in the inter-Form cricket championship between his boys and the Modern Transitus. He had intended to illuminate the event with his presence, but Thrigsby in July is not pleasant, and so he had come out by an early train to his house at Bigley in the hills which overflow Derbyshire into Cheshire.

He sat with a glow of satisfaction as he gazed at his hood and mortar-board and thought of Panoukian. He was pleased with Panoukian. He had “spotted” him in the Lower Third and rushed him up in two and a half years to the Sixth. There had been an anxious three years during which Panoukian had slacked, and taken to smoking, and been caught in a café flirting (in a school cap) with a waitress, and had been content with the superficial ease and brilliance with which he had mastered the Greek and Latin classics and the rudiments of philosophy. There had been a devastating term when Panoukian had taken to writing poetry, and then things had gone from bad to worse until he (Beenham) had lighted on the truth that Panoukian was stale and needed a fresh point of attack. Then he had Panoukian to stay with him at Bigley and turned him loose in French literature and, as a side issue, introduced him to Eckermann’s version of Goethe’s conversation. The boy was most keenly responsive to literature, and through these outside studies it had been possible to lead him back to the realization that Homer, Thucydides, Plato, Virgil and company had also produced literature and that their works had only been masquerading as text-books. . . . The fight was won, and F. J. Tibster of Balliol had written a most gratifying letter of commendation of Panoukian’s performance in the examination. This had yielded the greatest satisfaction to Panoukian père, and he had twice given Mr. Beenham lunch in the most expensive restaurant of Thrigsby’s new mammoth hotel, and now, when Panoukian fils was to leave the wing of his preceptor, had bidden him to meet Mrs. Panoukian—an Irishwoman—and all the Miss Panoukians. The railway journey from Bigley would be hot and unpleasant, and to reach Bungsall it was necessary to pass through some of the most stifling streets in Thrigsby. After the exhaustion of the summer term and the examinations the schoolmaster found it hard to conquer his reluctance. Only by thinking of the cool stream in the Highlands to which it was his habit to fly on the day after Speech Day could he stiffen himself to the effort of donning his dress clothes. (The Panoukians dressed in the evening since their Arthur had been embraced by Balliol and taken to the bosom of the Lady Dervorguilla.) He had a cold bath, and more than ever clearly he thought of the brown water of the burn foaming into white and creamy flecks over the rocks. How thoroughly, he thought, he had this year earned his weeks of peace and solitude.

He would catch the six-twenty-four. He had plenty of time and there would be a good margin in Thrigsby. He could look in at the Foreign Library, of which he was president, and give them his new selection of books to be purchased during the vacation. On the way he met Barnett, the captain of the Bigley Golf Club, and stayed to argue with him about the alterations to the fourteenth green, which he considered scandalous and incompetent. He told Barnett so with such heat and at such length that he only just caught the six-twenty-four and had to leap into a third-class carriage. It was empty. He opened the windows and lay at full length on the seat facing the engine. It was more hot and unpleasant than he had anticipated. He cursed Barnett and extended the malediction to Panoukian. It would have been more pleasant to spend the evening with Miss Clipton, sister and formerly housekeeper to a deceased bishop of Thrigsby, talking about her vegetable marrows. . . . Uncommonly hot. Deucedly hot. The train crawled so that there was no draught. He went to sleep.

He was awakened by the roar of the wheels crossing Ockley viaduct. Ockley sprawls up and down the steep sides of a valley. At the bottom runs a black river. Tall chimneys rise from the hillsides. From the viaduct you gaze down into thousands of chimneys trailing black smoke. The smoke rises and curls and writhes upward into the black pall that ever hangs over Ockley. This pall was gold and red and apricot yellow with the light of the sun behind it. There were folk at Bigley who said there was beauty in Ockley. . . . It was a frequent source of after-dinner argument in Bigley. Beauty. For H. J. Beenham all beauty lived away from Thrigsby and its environment. Smoke and beauty were incompatible. Still, in his half-sleeping, half-waking condition there was something impressive in Ockley’s golden pall. He raised himself on his elbow the better to look out, when he was shocked and startled by hearing a sort of whimper. Opposite him, in the corner, was sitting a girl, a very pretty girl, with a white, drawn face and her hands pressed together, her shoulders huddled and her face averted. Her eyes were blank and expressionless, and there was a great tear trickling down her nose. The light from the golden pall glowed over her face but seemed only to accentuate its misery and the utter dejection of her attitude.

“Poor girl!” thought the schoolmaster. “Poor, poor girl!” He felt a warm, melting sensation in the neighborhood of his breastbone; and with an impulsiveness altogether unusual to him he leaned forward and tried to lay his hand on her. He was still only half awake and was wholly under the impulse to bring comfort to one so wretched. The train lurched as it passed over a point, and, instead of her hand, he grasped her knee. At once she sprang forward and slapped his face. Stung, indignant, shocked, but still dominated by his impulse, urged by it to insist on its expression, he seized her by the wrists and tried to force her back into her seat and began to address her:

“My poor child! Something in you, in your eyes, has touched me. I do not know if I can. . . . Please sit down and listen to me.”

“Nasty old beast!” said the girl.

“I must protest,” replied Old Mole, “the innocence of my motives.” He still gripped her by the wrists. “Seeing you as I did, so unnerved, so——”

The train slowed down and stopped, but he did not notice it. He was absolutely absorbed in his purpose—to succor this young woman in distress and to show her the injustice of her suspicions. She by this time was almost beside herself with anger and fright, and she had struggled so violently—for he had no notion of the force with which he held her—that her hair had tumbled down behind and she had torn the seam of her sleeve and put her foot through a flounce in her petticoat.

He was thoroughly roused now, and shouted:

“You shall listen to me——”

“Let me go! Let me go!” screamed the girl.

The train had stopped opposite a train going in the other direction. The door of the compartment was opened suddenly, and Beenham found himself picked up and flung into the far corner. Over him towered an immense form clad in parson’s clothes—the very type of vengeful muscular Christianity.

In the corner the girl had subsided into hysterical sobs. The parson questioned her.

“Do you know this man?”

“No . . . no, sir.”

“Never seen him before?”

“Never, sir. He—he set on me.”

“Do you prefer a charge against him?”

“Yes, sir.”

Beenham could hardly hear what they said, but he was boiling with indignation.

“I protest——” he said.

“Silence!” shouted the parson. “But for my timely intervention Heaven knows what would have happened. . . . Silence! You and men like you are a pest to society, impervious to decency and the call of religion. . . . Fortunately there is law in the country and you shall know it.”

With that he pulled down the chain above the windows. In a moment or two the scowling guard appeared. The parson described the horrible scene he had witnessed from the train, that was even now moving Londonward, his interference, and declared his intention of seeing that the perpetrator of so vile a deed should be hounded down. He requested the guard to telephone at the next station to the Thrigsby police. A small crowd had collected. They hummed and buzzed with excitement, and fifteen men clambered into the compartment to assist the parson in his heroic defence of the young woman against the now fully awake and furious pedagogue. He tried to speak, but was shouted down: to move toward the parson, but was thrust back into his corner. Every one else had a perfectly clear-cut idea of what had happened. He himself was so busy emerging from his state of hallucination and trying to trace back step by step everything that had happened to produce the extraordinary eruption into what had been at Bigley an empty, ordinary, rather stuffy compartment in a railway train, that he could not even begin to contemplate the consequences or to think, rather, what they might all be moving toward. It was only as the train ran into Thrigsby, and he saw the name, that he associated it with that other word which had been on the parson’s lips:

“Police!”

There was a cold sinking in the pit of his stomach. Out of his hallucination came the remembrance that he had, with the most kindly and generous and spontaneously humane motives, used the girl with violence.—Police! He was given no time for thought. There was a policeman on the platform. A crowd gathered. It absorbed Beenham, thrust him toward the policeman, who seized him by the arm and, followed by the parson and the girl, they swept swiftly along the platform, down the familiar incline, the crowd swelling as they went, along an unknown street, squalid and vibrant with the din of iron-shod wheels over stone setts, to the police station. There a shabby swing door cut off the crowd, and Beenham, parson, girl and policeman stood in the charge room waiting for the officer at the desk to look up from his ledger.

The charge was made and entered. The girl’s name was Matilda Burn, a domestic servant. She was prompted by the parson, who swept aside her reluctance to speak. Old Mole was asked to give his name, address and occupation. He burst into a passionate flow of words, but was interrupted and coldly reminded that he was only desired to give bare information on three points, and that anything he might say would be used against him in evidence. He explained his identity, and the officer at the ledger looked startled, but entered the particulars in slow writing with a scratchy pen. The parson and the girl disappeared. The officer at the ledger cleared his throat, turned to the accused, opened his mouth, but did not speak. He scratched his ear with his pen, stooped and blew a fly off the page in front of him, made a visible effort to suppress his humanity and conduct the affair in accordance with official routine, and finally blurted out:

“Do you want bail?”

Old Mole gave the name and address of his Head Master.

“You can write if you like.”

The letter was written, read by the officer, and despatched. There was a whispered consultation behind the ledger, during which the unhappy schoolmaster read through again and again a list of articles and dogs missing, and then he was led to the inspector’s room and given a newspaper to read.

“Extraordinary!” he said to himself. Then he thought of the Panoukians and began to fidget at the idea of being late. He abominated unpunctuality. Had he not again and again had to punish young Panoukian for indulgence in the vice? The six-twenty-four had given him ample time. He pulled out his watch: Still twenty-five minutes, but he must hurry. He looked round the bare, dingy room vaguely, wonderingly. Incisively the idea of his situation bit into his brain. He was in custody—carcer, a prison. How absurd it was, rather funny! It only needed a little quiet, level-headed explanation and he would be free. The “chief” would confirm his story, his identity. . . . They would laugh over it. Very funny: very funny. A wonderful story for the club. He chuckled over it to himself until he began to think of the outcome. More than once he had served on a Grand Jury and had slept through the consideration of hundreds of indictments: a depressing experience for which the judge had rewarded him with nothing but compliments and an offer of a pass to view His Majesty’s prison. That brought him up with a jerk. He was in custody, charged with a most serious offence, for which he would be tried at the Assizes. It was monstrous, preposterous! It must be stopped at once. What a grotesque mistake! What an egregious, yet what a serious blunder! That officious idiot of a parson!

The Head Master arrived. He glowered at his colleague and seemed very agitated. He said:

“This is very serious, most unfortunate. It is—ah—as well for the prestige of the school that it has happened at the end of term. We must hush it up, hush it up.”

Beenham explained. He told the whole story, growing more and more amazed and indignant as he set it forth. The Head Master only said:

“I form no opinion. We must hush it up. It must be kept out of the papers.”

Not a word more could be wrung from him. With a stiff back and pursed lips he nodded and went away. He returned to say:

“Of course you will not appear at Speech Day. I will write to you as soon as I have decided what had best be done.”

“I shall be at Bigley,” said Old Mole.

He was released on bail and told to surrender himself at the police court when called upon.

In a dream he wandered out into the street and up into the main thoroughfare, along which every day in term time he walked between the station and the school. Impossible to go to the Panoukians; impossible to return to Bigley. Suppose he had been recognized! Any number of his acquaintances might be going out by the six-forty-nine. He must have been seen! Bigley would be alive with it! . . . He sent two telegrams, one to the Panoukians, the other to his housekeeper to announce that he would not be back that night.

He forgot to eat, and roamed through the streets of Thrigsby, finding relief from the strain of his fear and his tormented thoughts in observation. Dimly, hardly at all consciously, he began to perceive countless existences all apparently indifferent to his own. Little boys jeered at him occasionally, but the men and women took no notice of him. Streets of warehouses he passed through, streets of little blackened houses, under railway arches, under tall chimneys, past shops and theaters and music-halls, and waste grounds, and grounds covered with scaffolding and fenced in with pictured hoardings: an immense energy, the center of which was, surprisingly, not the school. He walked and thought and observed until he sank into exhaustion and confusion. In the evening, when the lamps were lit, the main streets were thronged with men and women idly strolling, for it was too hot for purpose or deliberate amusement.

Late, about eleven o’clock, he walked into his club. The porter saluted. In the smoke room two or three of his acquaintances nodded. No one spoke to him. In a corner was a little group who kept looking in his direction, so that after a time he began to feel that they were talking about him. He became acutely conscious of his position. There were muttering and whispering in the corner, and then one man, a tall, pale-faced man, whom he had known slightly for many years, arose from the group and came heavily toward him.

“I want to speak to you a moment,” said the man.

“Certainly. Certainly.”

They went outside.

“Er—of course,” said the man, “we are awfully sorry, but we can’t help feeling that it was a mistake for you to come here to-night. You must give us time, you know.”

Beenham looked the man up and down.

“Time for what?” he replied acidly.

“To put it bluntly,” came the answer, “Harbutt says he won’t stay in the club if you stay.”

Beenham turned on his heel and went downstairs. At the door he met the Head Master coming in, who sourly expressed pleasure in the meeting.

“I shall never enter the club again,” said Beenham.

The Head Master paid no attention to the remark, took him by the arm and led him into the street. There they paced up and down while it was explained that the Chief Constable had been approached and was willing to suspend proceedings until a full inquiry had been made, if Beenham were willing to face an inquiry; or, in the alternative, would allow him twenty-four hours in which to disappear from Thrigsby. The Lord Mayor and three other governors of the school had been seen, and they were all agreed that such an end to Mr. Beenham’s long and honorable connection with the foundation was deplorable.

“End!” gasped Beenham.

“The governors all expressed——” began the Head Master, when his colleague interrupted him with:

“What is your own opinion?”

“I—I——”

“What is your own feeling?”

“I am thinking of the school.”

“Then I am to suffer under an unjust and unfounded accusation?”

“The school——”

“Ach!——”

Impossible to describe the wonderful guttural sound that the unhappy man wrenched out of himself. He stood still and his brain began to work very clearly and he saw that the scandal had already begun to move so that if he accepted either of his chief’s alternatives and had the matter hushed up, or he vanished away within twenty-four hours, it would solidify, crystallize into conical form, descend and extinguish them. If, on the other hand, he insisted on a public inquiry, there would be a conflagration in which, though he might leave the court without a stain on his reputation—was not that the formula?—yet his worldly position would be consumed with possible damage to the institution to which he had given so many years of his life. His first impulse was to save his honor without regard to the cost or damage to others: but then he remembered the attitude of the men in the club, fathers of families with God knows what other claims to righteousness, and he saw that, though he might be innocent as a lamb, yet he had to face public opinion excited by prejudice, which, if he dared to combat it, he would only have enflamed. He was not fully aware of the crisis to which he had come, but his emotion at the idea of severing his connection with the place that had been the central point of his existence spurred him to an instinctive effort in which he began to perceive larger vistas of life. Against them as background everything that was and had been was reduced in size so that he could see it clearly and bioscopically. He knew, too, that he was seeing it differently from the Head Master, from Harbutt, from all the other men who would shrink away from the supposedly contagious danger of his situation, and he admitted his own helplessness. With that his immediate indignation at the conduct of individuals died away and he was left with an almost hysterical sense of the preposterousness of the world in which out of nothing, a misconstruction, a whole mental fabric could be builded beneath the weight of which a normal, ordinary, respectable, hard-working, conscientious man could be crushed. And yet he did not feel at all crushed, but only rather excited and uplifted with, from some mysterious source, a new accretion of strength.

“I see the force of your argument,” he said to his chief. “I see the inevitability of the course you have taken. The story, even with my innocence, is too amusing for the dignity of an ancient foundation and our honorable profession of pedagogy.”—He enjoyed this use of rhetoric as a relief to his feelings, for he was torn between tragedy and comedy, tears and laughter—“To oblige the Lord Mayor, the governors, and yourself, I will accept the generous offer of the Chief Constable. Good-bye. I hope you will not forget to mention Panoukian tomorrow.”

The Head Master pondered this for some moments and then held out his hand. Old Mole looked through him and walked on. He had not gone twenty yards when he began to chuckle, to gulp, to blink, and then to laugh. He laughed out loud, went on laughing, thumped in the air with his fist. Suddenly the laughter died in him and he thought:

“Twenty-five years! That’s a large slice out of a man’s life. Ended—in what? Begun—in what? To show—what is there? Ended in one sleepy, generous impulse leading to disaster. Twenty-five years, slumbered away, in an ancient and honorable profession, in teaching awkward, conceited, and, for the most part, grubby little boys things which they looked forward to forgetting as soon as they passed out into the world.” And he had taken pride in it, pride in a possession which chance and the muddle-headed excitability of men could in a short space of time demolish, pride in the thought that he was half remembered by some hundreds of the citizens of that huge, roaring city from whose turmoil and gross energy he had lived secluded. He looked back, and the years stretched before him tranquil and monotonous and foolish. He totted up the amount of money that he had drawn out of Thrigsby during those years and set against it what he had given—the use of himself, the unintelligent, mechanical use of himself. He turned from this unpleasant contemplation to the future. That was even more appalling. Within twenty-four hours he had to perform the definite act of disappearing from the scene. Beyond that lay nothing. To what place in the world could he disappear? He had one brother, a Chancery barrister and a pompous ass. They dined together once a year and quarreled. . . . His only sister was married to a curate, had an enormous family and small means. All his relations lived in a church atmosphere—his father had been a parson in Lincolnshire—and they distrusted him because of his avowed love for Lucretius and Voltaire. Certainly they would be no sort of help in time of trouble. . . . As for friends, he had none. His work, his days spent with crowds of homunculi had given him a taste for solitude and the habit of it. He had prided himself on being a clubbable man and he had had many acquaintances, but not, in his life, one single human being to whom in his distress he wished to turn. He had liked the crowds through which he had wandered. They had given him the most comforting kind of solitude. He was distressed now that the streets were so empty; shops, public-houses, theaters were closed. How dreary the streets were! How aimless, haphazard and sprawling was the town! How aimless, haphazard and sprawling his own life in it had been!

A woman passed him and breathed a hurried salute. He surveyed her with a detached, though warmly humorous, interest. She was, like himself, outcast, though she had found her feet and her own way of living. With the next woman he shook hands. She laughed at him. He raised his hat to the third. She stopped and stared at him, open-mouthed. As amazed, he stared at her. It was the young woman of the train.

He could find nothing to say, nor she; neither could move. Feeling the necessity of a salute, he removed his hat, bowed, and, finding a direct approach impossible, shot off obliquely and absurdly.

“I had once a German colleague who was a lavish and indiscriminate patron of the ladies of a certain profession. He resigned. I also have resigned.”

She said:

“I’m sorry,” and, having found her tongue, added:

“Can you tell me the way to the Flat Iron Market. My aunt won’t take me in.”

“Are you also in disgrace?”

“Yes, sir. I was in service. It was the young master. I did love him, I did really.”

“You had been dismissed when I met you in the train?”

“Yes, sir. They gave me a quarter of an hour to go, without wages, and they are sending on my box. My aunt won’t take me in.”

Again in her eyes was the expression of helplessness and impotence in the face of distress that had so moved him, and once again he melted. He forgot his own situation and was only concerned to see that she should not come to harm or be thrown destitute upon a cold, a busy, harsh, and indifferent world. Upon his inquiry as to the state of her purse, she told him she had only a shilling, and he pressed half a sovereign into her hand. Then he asked her why she wished to find the Flat Iron Market, and she informed him she had an uncle, Mr. Copas, who was there. She had only seen him twice, but he had been kind to her mother when she was alive, although he was not respectable.

They were directed by a policeman, and as they walked Beenham gave her the story of his experience at the police station and how he had accepted the Chief Constable’s ultimatum. And he employed the opportunity to complete his explanation of his extraordinary lapse from decorum.

“You can do silly things when you’re half awake,” said Matilda. “It’s like being in love, isn’t it?”

“I have never been in love.”

She shot a quick, darting glance at him and he blinked.

Flat Iron Market is a piece of waste land over against a railway arch. Here on Saturdays and holidays is held a traffic in old metal, cheap laces and trinkets, sweets and patent medicines, and in one corner are set up booths, merry-go-rounds, swing boats, cocoanut shies, and sometimes a penny gaff. In the evening, under the flare and flicker of naphtha lamps, the place is thronged with artisans and their wives and little dirty wizened children, and young men and maidens seeking the excitement of each other’s jostling neighborhood.

Now, as Beenham and Matilda came to it, it was dark and deserted; the wooden houses were shrouded, and the awnings of the little booths and the screens of the cocoanut shies flapped in the night wind. They passed a caravan with a fat woman and two young men sitting on the steps, and they yawped at the sight of Beenham’s white shirtfront.

“Does Mr. Copas live in a caravan?” asked Beenham.

“It’s the theayter,” replied Matilda.

Picking their way over the shafts of carts and empty wooden boxes, they came to a red and gilt fronted building adorned with mirrors and knobs and scrolls, above the portico of which was written: “Copases Theater Royal,” in large swollen letters. At either end of this inscription was a portrait, one of Mrs. Siddons in tragedy, the other of J. L. Toole in comedy. Toole had been only recently painted and had been given bright red hair. Mrs. Siddons, but for her label, would only have been recognizable by her nose.

In front of this erection was a narrow platform, on which stood a small automatic musical machine surmounted with tubular bells played by two little wooden figures, a man and a woman in Tyrolian costume, who moved along a semi-circular cavity. In the middle of the façade was an aperture closed in with striped canvas curtains. This aperture was approached from the ground by a flight of wooden steps through the platform.

“Please,” said Beenham, “please give my name as Mr. Mole.”

Matilda nodded and ran up the wooden steps and through the aperture. She called:

“It’s dark.”

When Mr. Mole followed her he found himself standing on the top of another flight of steps leading down into impenetrable gloom. He struck a light and peered into an auditorium of rough benches, the last few rows of which were raised above the rest. Matilda looked up at him, and he was struck by the beauty of the line of her cheek from the brow down into the neck. She smiled and her teeth flashed white. Then the match went out.

He lit another, and they moved toward the stage, through the curtains of which came a smell of onions and cheese, rather offensive on such a hot night. For the first time Beenham began to feel a qualm as to the adventure. The second match went out, and he felt Matilda place her hand on his arm, and she led him toward the stage, told him to duck his head, and they passed through into a narrow space, lit by a light through another curtain, and filled, so far as he could see, with scenery and properties.

“Have you been here before?” he said.

“When I was a little girl. I think it’s this way.”

He stumbled and brought a great pole and a mass of dusty canvas crashing down. At once there was the battering of feet on boards, the din of voices male and female, and above them all a huge booming bass roaring:

“In Hell’s name, what’s that?”

Matilda giggled.

A curtain was torn aside, and the light filled the place where they were. Against it they could see silhouetted the shape of a diminutive man craning forward and peering. He had a great stick in his hand, and he bellowed:

“Come out o’ that! It’s not the first time I’ve leathered a man, and it won’t be the last. This ’ere’s a theater, my theater. It ain’t a doss house. Come out o’ that.”

“It’s me,” said Matilda.

“Gorm, it’s a woman!”

“It’s me, uncle.”

“Eh?”

“It’s me, Matilda Burn.”

“What? Jenny’s girl?”

“Yes, uncle.”

“Well, I never! Who’s your fancy?”

“It’s Mr. Mole.”

The figure turned and vanished, and the curtain swung to again. They heard whisperings and exclamations of surprise, and in a moment Mr. Copas returned with a short ladder which he thrust down into their darkness. They ascended it and found themselves on the stage. Matilda was warmly embraced, while her companion stood shyly by and gazed round him at the shabby scenery and the footlights and the hanging lamps over his head. He found it oddly exciting to be standing in such a place, and he said to himself: “This is the stage,” as in Rome one might stand and say: “This is the Forum.” This excitement and romantic fervor carried with it a certain helplessness, as though he had been plunged into a foreign land that before he had only dimly realized.

“This is the stage! This is the theater!”

It was a strange sensation of being detached and remote, of having passed out of ordinary existence into a region not directly concerned with it and subject to other laws. He felt entirely foreign to it, but then, also, under its influence, he felt foreign to his own existence which had cast him high and dry and ebbed away from him. It was like one of those dreams in which one startlingly leaves the earth and, as startlingly, finds security in the thin air through which, bodiless, one soars. There was something buoyant in the atmosphere, a zestfulness, and at the same time an oppressiveness, against which rather feebly he struggled, while at the same time he wondered whether it came from the place or from the people. Mr. Copas, the large golden-haired lady, the thin, hungry-looking young man, the drabbish young woman, the wrinkled, ruddy, beaming old woman, the loutish giant, the elderly, seedy individual, the little girl with her hair hanging in rat’s tails, who clustered round Matilda and smiled at her and glowered at her and kissed her and fondled her.

To all these personages he was presented as “Mr. Mole.” When at length Mr. Copas and his niece had come to an end of their exchange of family reminiscence, the men shook hands with him and the women bowed and curtsied with varying degrees of ceremony, after which he was bidden to supper and found himself squatting in a circle with them round a disordered collection of plates and dishes, bottles, and enameled iron cups, all set down among papers and costumes and half-finished properties.

“Sit down, Mr. Mole,” said Mr. Copas. “Any friend of any member of my family is my friend. I’m not particular noble in my sentiments, but plain and straightforward. I’m an Englishman, and I say: ‘My country right or wrong.’ I’m a family man and I say: ‘My niece is my niece, right or wrong.’ Them’s my sentiments, and I drink toward you.”

When Mr. Copas spoke there was silence. When he had finished then all the rest spoke at once, as though such moments were too rare to be wasted. Matilda and Mr. Copas engaged in an earnest conversation and the clatter of tongues went on, giving Mr. Mole the opportunity to still his now raging hunger and slake the tormenting thirst that had taken possession of him. Silence came again and he found himself being addressed by Mr. Copas.

“Trouble is trouble, I say, and comes to all of us. For your kindness to my niece, much thanks. She will come along of us and welcome. And if you, being a friend of hers, feel so disposed, you can come along, too. It’s a come-day-go-day kind of life, here to-day and gone to-morrow, but there’s glory in it. It means work and plenty of it, but no one’s ever the worse for that.”

It was a moment or two before Beenham realized that he was being offered a position in the troupe. He took a long draught of beer and looked round at the circle of faces. They were all friendly and smiling, and Matilda’s eyes were dancing with excitement. He met her gaze and she nodded, and he lost all sense of incongruity and said that he would come, adding, in the most courteous and elegant phrasing, that he was deeply sensible of the privilege extended to him, but that he must return to his house that night and set his affairs in order, whereafter he would with the greatest pleasure renounce his old life and enter upon the new. He was doubtful (he said) of his usefulness, but he would do his best and endeavor not to be an encumbrance.

“If you gave me the Lord Mayor of Thrigsby,” said Mr. Copas, “I would turn him, if not into a real actor, at least into something so like one that only myself and one other man in England could tell the difference.”

Mr. Mole found that he had just time to catch the last train home, and, after arranging for his return on the following day, he exchanged courtesies all round, was shown out by a little door at the back of the stage, and walked away through the now empty streets. He was greatly excited and uplifted, and it was not until he reached the incline of the station that memory reasserted itself and brought with it the old habit of prudence, discretion, and common sense. He was able to go far enough back to see the little dusty theater and the queer characters in it as fantastic and antipodean, but when he came to the events of that evening the contrast was blurred and the world of settled habit and conviction was merged into the unfamiliarity of the stage and became one with it in absurdity. The thought of stepping back from his late experience into ordinary existence filled him with anger and hot resentment: the passage from the scene at the club and the interview with his chief to Mr. Copas’s company was an easy and natural transition, or so it seemed when he thought of Matilda.

He felt very defiant when he reached Bigley and half hoped that he might meet some of his acquaintances. They would go on catching the early train in the morning and the through train in the evening, while he would be away and free. Some such feeling he had always had in July of superiority over the commercial men who had but three weeks’ holiday in the year, while he had eight weeks at a stretch. Now he was to go away forever, and Bigley would talk for a little and then forget and go on cluttering about its families and its ailments and its inheritances and its church affairs and its golf course and the squabbles with the Lord of the Manor. He met no one and found his house shut up, and it took him fully half an hour to rouse his man. By that time he had lost his temper and had no desire save to bully the fellow. Everything else was wiped out, and he wanted only to assert himself in bluster. In this way he avoided any awkward wondering whether the man knew, got out the information that he was going away, probably leaving Bigley, selling the house and furniture, and would write further instructions when he had settled down. He ordered and counter-ordered and ordered breakfast until he had fixed it at ten, and at last, after a round volley of oaths because the man turned to him with a question in his eyes, went upstairs to his room, rolled into bed, and slept as deeply as an enchanted knight beneath the castle of a fairy princess.

The next morning he went through his accounts, found that his capital amounted to nearly four thousand pounds, had his large suitcase packed with a careful selection of clothes and books, told his man he was going abroad, paid him three months’ wages in advance, apologized for his violence overnight, shook hands, went round the garden to say good-bye to his vegetable marrows and sweet peas, and then departed.

In Thrigsby he saw his solicitor (an old pupil), who was professionally sympathetic, but took his instructions for the sale of his house and furniture gravely and promised to keep his whereabouts and all communications secret.

“It is a most serious calamity,” said the solicitor.

“Damn it all,” rejoined Old Mole, “I like it.” And he visited his bank. The manager had always thought Beenham “queer,” and received his rather unusual instructions without astonishment.

“You are leaving Thrigsby?”

“For good. Can’t think why I’ve stayed here so long.”

He drew a large sum of money in notes and gold and dined well and expensively at a musty, heavily carpeted commercial hotel. When the porter had placed his bag in a cab and turned for his instructions he gaped in surprise on being told to drive to the Flat Iron Market. Even more surprised were the frequenters of that resort when the cab drew up by the pavement and a well-dressed, middle-aged gentleman with gold spectacles descended and pushed his way through the crowd jostling and chattering under the blare and din of the mechanical organs and the flicker and flare of the naphtha lamps to the back of Copas’s Theater Royal, which he entered by the stage door. It was whispered that he was a detective, and he was followed by a buzzing train of men and women. Disappointed of the looked-for sensation, they soon dispersed and were swallowed up in the shifting crowd.

Groping through the darkness, he came to the greenroom—Mr. Copas’s word for it—and deposited his bag. On the stage, through a canvas curtain, he could hear the thudding of feet and the bellowing of a great voice broken every now and then with cheers at regular intervals and applause from the auditorium. In a corner on a basket sat Matilda. She was wearing a pasteboard crown and gazing at herself in a mirror. As he dropped his bag she looked up and grinned.

“So you’ve come back? I didn’t think you would.”

“Yes, I’ve come back. The school has broken up.”

She removed her crown.

“Like to see the show? Uncle’s got ’em tonight.”

“Got? What has he got?”

“The audience.”

She led him to the front of the house, where they were compelled to stand, for all the benches were full, packed with sweating, zestful men and women who had paid for enjoyment and were receiving it in full measure.

In the “Tales out of School,” published after H. J. Beenham’s death by one of the many pupils who became grateful on his achieving celebrity, there is an admirable account of his first impression of the theater which can only refer to the performance of Mr. Copas in the Flat Iron Market. Till then he says he had always regarded the theater as one of those pleasures without which life would be more tolerable, one of those pleasures to face which it is necessary to eat and drink too much. The two respectable theaters in Thrigsby were maintained by annual pantomimes and kept open from week to week by the visits of companies presenting replicas of alleged successful London plays. He had never attended either theater unless some one else paid. . . . Here now in this ramshackle Theater Royal, half tent, half booth, his sensations were very mixed. At first the shabby scenery, the poverty of the stage furniture, the tawdriness of the costumes of the players, filled him with a pitying sense of the ludicrous. The program was generous, opening with “Robert Macaire,” passing on to “Mary Queen of Scots,” and ending with a farce called “Trouble in the Home,” while between the pieces there would be song and dance by Mr. Fitter, the celebrated comedian. All this was announced on a placard hanging from the proscenium. . . . Mary Queen of Scots was sitting, crowned, on a Windsor chair at the back of the stage, surrounded with three courtiers. As Darnley (or it might be Bothwell), Mr. Copas was delivering himself of an impassioned if halting narration, addressed to the hapless Queen through the audience. He was certainly a very bad actor, so Beenham thought until he had listened to him for nearly five minutes, at the end of which a change took place in his mind and he found himself forced to accept Mr. Copas’s own view of the traffic of the stage. It was impossible to make rhyme or reason of the play, which showed the most superb disregard for history and sense. Apart from Mr. Copas it did not exist. He was its center and its circumference. It began and ended in him, moved through him from its beginning to its end. The rest of the characters were his puppets. When he came to an end of a period Mary Queen of Scots would turn on one of three moods—the tearful, the regal, the noisily defiant; or a page would say, “Me Lord! Me Lord!”; or the lugubrious young man, dressed in priestly black, would borrow from another play and in a sepulchral voice declaim, “Beware the Ides of March.” The performance was an improvisation and in that art only Mr. Copas had any skill, unless he had deliberately so subdued the rest that he was left with his own passionate belief in himself and acting as acting to clothe the naked and deformed skeleton with flesh. Whatever the process of his mind he did succeed in hypnotizing himself and his audience, including Mr. Mole and Matilda, and worked up to a certain height and ended in shocking bathos so suddenly as to create surprise rather than derision. He believed in it all and made everybody else believe.

Matilda gave a sigh as the curtains were drawn and Mr. Copas appeared, bowing and bowing again, using his domination over his audience to squeeze more and more applause out of them.

“Ain’t it lovely?” said Matilda.

“It is certainly remarkable,” replied Mr. Mole.

“You’d never think he had a floating kidney, would you?”

“I would not.”

“It’s that makes him a little quick in his temper.”

From the audience arose a smell of oranges, beer and peppermint, and there were much talk and laughter, giggling and round resounding kissing. No change of scene was considered necessary for the song and dance of Mr. Fitter, who turned out to be the lugubrious young man. He had no humor, but he worked very hard and created some amusement. Mr. Copas did not appear in the farce, which was deplorable and made Mr. Mole feel depressed and ashamed, so that for a moment his old point of view reasserted itself and he felt aghast at the undertaking upon which he was embarked. A moment or two before he had been telling himself that this was “life”—the talk and the laughter and the kissing; now he felt only disgust at its coarseness and commonness. He was dejected and miserable, stripped even of the intellectual interest roused by Mr. Copas. The loutish buffoons on the stage with their brutal humors filled him with resentment at their degradation. Only his obstinacy saved him from yielding to the impulse to escape. . . . Matilda had grown tired of standing and had taken his arm. She laughed at nearly all the jokes. Her laughter was shrill and immoderate. He called himself fool, but he stayed.

He was warmly welcomed by Mr. Copas after the performance. His congratulations and praise were accepted with proper modesty.

“Acting,” said Mr. Copas, “is a nart. There’s some as thinks it’s a trick, like performing dogs, but it’s a nart. What did you think of Mrs. Copas?”

The question was embarrassing. Fortunately no answer was expected.

“I’ve taught her everything she knows. She’s not very good at queens, but her mad scenes can’t be beat, can’t be beat. My line’s tragedy by nature, but a nartist has to be everything. . . . What’s your line, Mr. Mole?”

“I don’t know that I have a line.”

Mr. Copas rubbed his chin.

“Of course. You look like a comic, but we’ll see, we’ll see. You couldn’t write plays, I suppose? Not that there’s much writing to be done when you give three plays a night, and a different program every night. Just the plot’s all we want. Are you good at plots?”

“I’ve read a good deal.”

“Ah! I was never a reader myself. . . . Of course, I can’t pay you anything until I know whether you’re useful or not.”

“I’ve plenty of money, thanks.”

Mr. Copas eyed his guest shrewdly.

“Of course,” he said, “of course, if you were really keen I could take you in as a sort of partner.”

“I don’t know that I——”

“Ten pounds would do it.”

In less than half an hour Mr. Mole was a partner in the Theater Royal and Mr. and Mrs. Copas were drinking his health in Dublin stout. They found him a bed in their lodgings in a surprisingly clean little house in a grimy street, and they sat up half the night discussing plays and acting with practical illustrations. He was fascinated by the frank and childish egoism of the actor and enjoyed firing him with the plots of the Greek tragedies and as many of the Latin comedies as he could remember offhand.

“By Jove!” cried Copas. “You’ll be worth three pounds a week to me. Iffyjenny’s just the part Mrs. Copas has been looking for all her life. Ain’t it, Carrie?”

But Mrs. Copas was asleep.

In the very early morning the Theater Royal was taken to pieces and stacked on a great cart. The company packed themselves in and on a caravan and they set out on their day’s journey of thirty miles to a small town in Staffordshire, in the marketplace of which they were to give a three weeks’ season. Mr. Copas drove the caravan and Mr. Mole sat on the footboard, and as they threaded their way through the long suburbs of Thrigsby he passed many a house where he had been a welcome guest, many a house where he had discussed the future of a boy or an academic problem, or listened to the talk of the handful of cultured men attracted to the place by its school and university. How few they were he had never realized until now. They had seemed important when he was among them, one of them; their work, his work, had seemed paramount, the justification of, the excuse for all the alleged squalor of Thrigsby which he had never explored and had always taken on hearsay. That Thrigsby was huge and mighty he had always admitted, but never before had he had any sense of the remoteness from its existence of himself and his colleagues. It was Thrigsby that had been remote, Thrigsby that was ungrateful and insensible of the benefits heaped upon it. There had always been a sort of triumph in retrieving boys from Thrigsby for culture. He could only think of it now with a bitterness that fogged his judgment. His discovery of the Flat Iron Market made him conceive Thrigsby as a city of raw, crude vitality on which he had for years been engaged in pinning rags and tatters of knowledge in the pathetic belief that he was giving it the boon of education—secondary education. And there frothed and bubbled in his tired mind all the jargon of his old profession. In a sort of waking nightmare he set preposterous questions in interminable examinations and added up lists of marks and averaged them with a sliding rule, and blue-penciled false quantities in Latin verse. . . . And the caravan jogged on. He looked back over the years, and through them there trailed a long monotonous stream of boys, who had taken what he had to give, such as it was, and given nothing in return. He saw his own futile attempts to keep in touch with them and follow their careers. They were not worth following. Nine-tenths of them became clerks in banks and offices, sank into mediocre existences, married, produced more boys. The mockery of it all! He thought of his colleagues, how, if they stayed, they lost keenness and zest. How, if they went, it was to seek security and ease, to marry, to “settle down,” and produce more boys. Over seven hundred boys in the school there were, and all as alike as peas in a pod, all being taught year in, year out, the same things out of the same books by the same men. His thoughts wound slowly round and round and the bitterness in him ate into his soul and numbed him. The caravan jogged on. He cared nothing where he was, whither he might be going, what became of him. Only to be moving was enough, to be moving away from the monotony of boys and the black overpowering vitality of Thrigsby.

It was not easy for Mr. Copas to be silent and he addressed his new partner frequently on all manner of subjects, the weather, the horse’s coat, the history of Mr. Fitter, and all with such absorption that they had gone eight miles and were just passing out of Thrigsby into its southeast spur of little chimney-dominated villages before he awoke to the fact that he was receiving no attention.

“Dotty!” he said, with a click of his tongue, and thereafter he fell to conning new speeches for the favorite parts of his repertory. Slowly they crawled up a long slope until they rounded the shoulder of a low rolling hill, from whence the world seemed to open up before them. Below lay a lake, blue under the vivid sky, gleaming under the green wooded hills that enclosed it. Beyond rose line upon line of round hummocky hills. The caravan stopped and with a jolt Mr. Mole came out of the contemplation of the past when he was known as H. J. Beenham, and sat gaping down at the lake and the hills. He was conscious of an almost painful sense of liberation. The view invited to move on and on, to range over hill after hill to discover what might lie beyond.

“What hills are those?” he asked.

“You might call them the Pennine Range.”

“The backbone of England. That’s a school phrase.”

“You been asleep? Eh?”

“Not exactly asleep. Kind of cramped.”

“You’re a funny bloke. I been a-talking to you and you never listened.”

“Didn’t I? I’m sorry.”

“We water the horses just here.”

There was a spring by the roadside and here the caravan drew up. Mrs. Copas produced victuals and beer. Conversation was desultory.

“Can’t do with them there big towns,” said Mr. Copas, and Old Mole then noticed a peculiarity of the actor’s wife. Whenever he spoke she gazed at him with a rapt stupid expression and the last few words of his sentences were upon her lips almost before they left his. It was fascinating to watch and the schoolmaster forgot the feeling of repugnance with which their methods of eating inspired him. He watched Mrs. Copas and heard her husband, so that every remark was broken up:

“Wouldn’t go near them if it weren’t for the——”

“Money.”

“Give me a bit of cheese and a mug of beer by the——”

“Roadside.”

“But the show’s got to——”

“Earn its keep.”

“Earn its keep. I’m going to sleep. Them as wants to walk on can walk on.”

Mr. Copas rose and went into the caravan and his wife followed him. The wagon had not yet caught them up.

“Shall we walk on?” said Matilda.

“If it’s a straight road.”

“Oh! There’ll be signposts. We’ll maybe find a wood.”

So they walked on. She was wearing a blue print frock with the sleeves rolled up to her elbow. She had very pretty arms.

“I sha’n’t stop ’ere long,” she said.

“No? Why not?”

“It ain’t good enough. Nothing’s good enough if you stop too long at it. Uncle’ll never be any different.”

“Will any of us ever be different?”

“I shall,” she said, and she gave a queer little defiant laugh and her stride lengthened so that she shot a pace or two ahead of him. She turned and laughed at him over her shoulder.

“Come along, slowcoach.”

He grunted and made an effort, but could not catch her. So they moved until they came to a little wood with a white gate in the hedges. Through this she went, he after her, and she flung herself down in the bracken, and lay staring up through the leaves of the trees. He stood looking down at her. It was some time before she broke the silence and said:

“Sit down and smell. Ain’t it good? . . . Do you think if you murdered me now they’d ever find me?”

“What a horrible idea?”

“I often dream I’ve committed a murder. They say it’s lucky. Do you believe in dreams?”

“Napoleon believed in dreams.”

“Who was he?”

“He was born in Corsica, and came to France with about twopence halfpenny in his pocket. He made himself Emperor before he was forty, and died in exile.”

“Still, he’d had his fling. I’m twenty-one. How old are you?”

“Twice that and more.”

“Are you rich or clever or anything like that?”

“No!” he smiled at the question. “Nothing like that.”

She sat up and chewed a long grass stalk.

“I’m lucky.” She gave a little sideways wag of her chin. “I know I’m lucky. If only I’d had some education.”

“That’s not much good to you.”

“It makes you speak prop’ly.”

That was a view of education never before presented to him. Certainly the sort of education he had doled out had done little to amend the speech of his Thrigsbian pupils.

“Is that all you want—to speak properly?”

“Yes. You speak prop-properly.”

“Nothing else.”

“There is a difference between gentlemen and others. I want to have to do with gentlemen.”

“And ladies?”

“Oh! I’ll let the ladies look after theirselves.”

“Themselves.”

“Themselves.”

She flushed at the correction and a dogged sulky expression came into her eyes. She nibbled at the grass stalk until it disappeared into her mouth. For a moment or two she sat plucking at her lower lip with her right finger and thumb. Through her teeth she said:

“I will do it.”

Contemptuously, with admirable precision, she spat out the grass stalk against the trunk of a tree.

“Did you ever see a lady do that? You never did. You’ll see me do things you’ve never seen a lady do. You’ll see me—— But you’ve got to teach me first. You’ll teach me, won’t you? . . . You won’t go away until you’ve taught me? You won’t go away?”

“You’re the most extraordinary young woman I ever met in my life.”

“Did you come to uncle because of me?”

“Eh?”

He stared at her. The idea had not presented itself to him before. She was not going to allow him to escape it.

“Did you come to uncle because of me?”

He knew that it was so.

“Yes,” he said. “Hadn’t we better go?”

“Not yet.”

She was kneeling beside him mischievously tickling the back of his hand with a frond of bracken.

“Not yet. Do you remember what you said to me that night?”

“No. What did I say?”

“You said you’d never been in love.”

“No more I have.”

“Come along then.”

The caravan hove in sight as they reached the gate. She joined Mrs. Copas inside, and he, Mr. Copas, on the footboard. He was filled with a bubbling humor and was hard put to it not to laugh aloud. He had no clear memory of the talk in the wood, but he liked the delicious absurdity of it.

“In love?” he said to himself. “Nonsense.”

All the same he could not away with the fact that he had a new zest and pleasure in contemplating the future. Thrigsby and all its works fell away behind him and he was glad of his promise to teach the girl. . . . One girl after hundreds of boys! It had been one of his stock jests for public dinners in Thrigsby that the masters of the Grammar School and the mistresses of the High School should change places. No one had ever taken him seriously until now Fate had done so. Of course it could not last, this new kind of perambulatory school with one master and one pupil; the girl was too attractive; she would be snapped up at once, settle down as a wife and mother before she knew where she was. In his thoughts he had so isolated himself with her that old prejudices leaped up in him and gave him an uncomfortable sense of indiscretion. That, however, he placated with the reminder that, after all, they were chaperoned by Mrs. Copas.