Old Mole Being the Surprising Adventures in England of Herbert Jocelyn Beenham, M.A., Sometime Sixth-Form Master at Thrigsby Grammar School in the County of Lancaster

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."