V. (Ch 3) Mac's small problem [Literally]

[Terrance]

If Mac was literally a "young Lochinvar" before his
"problem", "being daft for small girls", sent him south to
Yorkshire where he got in trouble a second time it seems, he
would have been a Lord. So a Lord, a "young Lochinvar",
seems to be following an historical pattern, down from
Scotland to Yorkshire where he can only get in with the
V-audville crowd, and where he can only dance a bit, sing a
bit, and tell a few "passable barnyard jokes," (now every
daft Scotsman I've ever met could trade barnyard jokes for
Irish Limericks about the Clergy till the cows came home),
so maybe Mac Burgess is none of your V-audville stock,
except for his Small problem. 

Why is Max or Ralph trying to convince himself, "Max told
himself" that the small ones know what they are doing?
Sounds like a problem to me. And he draws the line at
sixteen OR SO--so as not to ruin a pure pas de deux. "That's
Glory for you,"  said Alice. 

And,  "Lardwick- in- the- fen"? Sounds like another Pig. 

Why does he try not to forget the "tableau"? 

"Romantic tragedy"? Now that's an allusion we can't ignore
isn't it?

The eyes are dry, so what? "She wanted it", he says, sure,
but then he says, "who knew what any of them wanted?" That's
probably why a riot of hating faces ran him out of town, if
we can't know what the small ones want, isn't it possible
that they don't know either, in which case, their being
small and all, we should give the benefit of growing big and
deciding? 

He is now in Alex, and the narrator suggests that he's going
to have to leave there too, since he has this Small problem,
but the Tourist don't care that there is a Mac with a Small
problem, he's as much (oh the IRONY here) a feature of the
topography as the all the other peasants that the Tourists
use as automata and take for granted. Small problem is that
Irony, that these Tourists, in this Part they are English
and German, don't see the "Short Eye" that is going to rape
one of their children because he is simply just one more
vagrant who exists, though unwillingly. 

What's Cook's machinery?