A friendly city seemed London to Clara as she left the shop. A fresh wind was blowing, and she stood for some moments to drink in the keen air. The sky was full of clouds, gray, white, and cinnamon against the smoky blue, as she turned south with eyes newly eager for beauty and friendliness. Above the roofs, the statue of Lord Nelson stood perched in absurd elevation above the London that flouted his Emma, and Clara laughed to see the little gray man in cocked hat symbolising for her the delicious absurdity of London, where nothing and nobody could ever be of the smallest importance in its hugeness.... This was its charm, that an individual could in it feel the indifference of humanity exactly as on a hill the indifference of Nature can be felt. A city of strangers! Everybody was strange to everybody else. That was good and healthy. Nothing in London was on show, nothing dressed for the tourist. Living in rooms in London, one could be as lonely as in a hut in the wilderness.
She walked down to the Imperium, and, entering by the stage door, found Charles in excited converse with the scenic artist, Mr Smithson, who was looking at a drawing and scratching his head dubiously.
'It's clever, Mr Mann, but nothing like the seaside. Sir Henry's sure to want his waves "off," and the sun ought to look a bit like it.'
'That's my design, Mr Smithson. Sir Henry said you would paint it. If you won't, I'll do it myself.... Ah! Clara, do come and explain to Mr Smithson what we want.'
Smithson turned angrily.—
'He gives me a blooming drawing with purples and golds and blues and every colour but the natural colours of a sea-side place. I've painted scenery for thirty years, and I ought to know what a stage island is like by now. I've done a dozen sets forThe Tempestin my time.'
'It is an enchanted island,' said Clara.
'But Prospero was Duke of Milan.... I'vebeento the Mediterranean to see for myself and I know what the colouring is.... I can't believe that Sir Henry has passed this. God knows what kind of lighting it will take.'
Charles threw his hat on the ground and stamped on it.
'Dolt! Fool! Idiot!' he shouted. 'Go away and paint it as I tell you to paint it.'
'Damned if I do,' said Smithson. 'My firm has painted all the scenery for this theatre since Sir Henry took it, and we've had our name on the programme, and we've got a reputation to lose. When Shakespeare says an island, he means an island, not the crater of a blooming volcano....'
Charles snatched his drawing out of Mr Smithson's hand, and with an expression of extreme agony he said.—
'Clara, you dragged me into this infernal theatre. Will you please see that I am not driven mad in it? Am I an artist?'
'You may be an artist, Mr Mann,' said Mr Smithson, 'but I'm a practical scene-painter. I was painting scenery before you were born. I was three years old in my father's workshop when I put my first dab of paint on for the Valley of Diamonds for Drury Lane in Gustus Harris's days.'
The argument might have gone on indefinitely, but fortunately Sir Henry came down the stairs with Lady Butcher. He was immaculately dressed in frock-coat and top hat, gray Cashmere trousers, and white waistcoat to attend with his wife a fashionable reception. With a low bow, he swept off his very shiny hat, and said to Lady Butcher,—
'My dear, Mr Charles Mann.'
Lady Butcher gave a curt nod.
'My dear, Miss Day....'
'Che-arming!' drawled Lady Butcher, holding out her hand very high in the air. Clara reached up to it and shook it sharply.
'Mr Smithson doesn't like Charles's drawing for the cave scene,' said Clara. 'He can't quite see it, you know, because it is a little different.'
'I won't be a moment, my dear,' said Sir Henry, and Lady Butcher sailed out into the street.
'What's the matter, Smithson?'
'We've never done anything like this before. There's nothing like it in Nature.'
'There is nothing like Caliban in Nature,' said Clara sweetly, and Sir Henry caught at her hint, scowled at Smithson, and growled,—
'I have passed it. If it needs modification we can settle it at rehearsal. Go ahead. I want to see it before I go away.'
'But there are no measurements, Sir Henry.'
'You know what we can do and what we can't.'
'Very well, Sir Henry.' Mr Smithson clapped on his bowler hat and rushed away.
Charles stooped to gather up his battered hat, and Sir Henry seized Clara's arm, squeezed it tight, looked out through the door at his magnificent wife, and heaved an enormous sigh. Clara in her amazing new happiness smiled at him, and he muttered,—
'You grow in beauty every day. A-ah! Good-day, Mann. The theatre is at your disposal.'
He fixed his eyes on Clara for a moment, then wrenched himself away.
There were one or two letters for her in the rack. She took them down, and turned to find Charles, having smoothed out his hat, standing ruefully staring through his pince-nez.
'These people are altogether too busy for me,' he said. 'All the work I've put in seems to be nothing to them. I had a terrible turn with Butcher two days ago, and now this man Smithson has been too much for me. They treat me like a tailor, and expect me to cut my scenery to fit their theatre.... I wish you'd come back, chicken. I'm in a dreadful muddle. I've been working till I can't see, and I've been readingThe Tempesttill my mind is as salt as a dried haddock.... But I've drawn a marvellous Caliban, part fish, part frog, part man ... Life emerging from the sea. I'm sure now that we're all spawned from the sea, and that life on the earth is only what has been left after the sun has dried it up....'
Clara looked at him apprehensively. She still felt responsible for him, but she was no longer part and parcel of him. She was free of his imagination and could be critical of it.
'Never mind, Charles,' she said. 'Let us go and look at the stage, and you can tell me what you have planned, and then we will go out and talk, and decide what we will do during the holidays. I have promised to go to Sir Henry's in the Lakes for a few days, and Verschoyle has promised to motor me up there.'
Charles's fingers fumbled rather weakly round his lips, and she saw to her distress that he had been biting his nails again.
'Aren't you ever coming back, my chicken, my love? ... I'm sorry we came to London now. We should have gone to Sicily as I wanted. One can live in such places. Here everybody is so business-like, so set, so used to doing and thinking in one particular way.'
'Has anything happened?' asked Clara, knowing that he was never critical without a cause.
'No,' he replied, rather shortly, 'no.'
She was rather irritated by him. He had no right to be as foolish and helpless as to have let her humiliate him by extricating him from his argument with Smithson, upon which he ought never to have entered. Smithson was only a kind of tradesman after all.
They went on to the stage and Charles waxed eloquent over the scenery he had designed. Eloquence with Charles was rather an athletic performance. He took a tape measure from his pocket, and raced about with it, making chalk marks on the boards.
The scenery door was open, and the sunlight poured in in a great shaft upon him, and Clara, watching him, was suddenly most painfully sorry for him. He worked himself up into a throbbing enthusiasm, torrents of words poured from his lips, as with strange gesticulations he described the towering rocks, the wind-twisted trees, the tangle of lemons, the blue light illuminating the magician's grotto, the golden light that should hang about the rocky island jutting up from the sea. All this he talked of, while the sun shone through his long yellow hair and revealed its streaks of silver.... At last he stood in the sunlight, with his arms outstretched, as though he were evoking his vision from the heavens to take shape upon the stage.
Clara, watching him, perceived that he was a born actor. He trod the stage with loving feet, and with a movement entirely different from that which he used in the street or among people who were not of the theatre. This surely was the real Charles. The light of the sun upon him was inappropriate. It mocked him and inexorably revealed the fact that he was no longer young. The scenery door was closed and the discordance ceased, but more clearly than ever was Charles revealed as an actor treading easily and affectionately his native elevation. The influence of the place affected even himself, and after he had constructed his imaginary scenery round himself, he said,—
'One of the first parts I ever played was Ferdinand staggering beneath logs of wood.'
He assumed an imaginary log and recited,—
'This my mean task would beAs heavy to me as 'tis odious; butThe mistress which I serve quickens what's deadAnd makes my labours pleasures: Oh, she isTen times more gentle than her father's crabbed;And he's composed of harshness. I must removeSome thousands of these logs and pile them up,Upon a sore injunction: my sweet mistressWeeps when she sees me work; and says such basenessHad never like executor.
He produced the illusion of youth, and his voice was so entrancing that Clara, like Miranda, wept to see him.... He threw off his part with a great shout, rushed at her and caught her up in a hug.
'Chicken,' he said, 'don't let us be silly any more. We have won through. Here we are in the theatre. We've conquered the stage, and soon all those seats out there will be full of eager people saying, "Who are these wonders? Can it be? Surely they are none other than Charles and Clara Mann?"'
'Day,' said she.
He stamped his foot impatiently.
'What's in a name? Day, if you like. Artists can and must do as they please. This is our real life, here where we make beauty. The rest is for city clerks and stockbrokers who can't trust themselves to behave decently unless they have a perfect net of rules from which they cannot escape.'
'I don't want to talk about it. Go on with your work, Charles.'
'I've finished for to-day.... Will you let me take you out to dinner?'
'No. I've promised Verschoyle.'
'Damn! You oughtn't to be seen with him so much. People will say you have left me for his money.'
'I thought artists didn't care what people say.'
'They don't, Clara. They don't.'
'You must be sensible, Charles. You're not safe. You can't take risks until you are successful.'
'Then I won't succeed. I won't go on.... A most unfortunate thing has happened. Clott has vanished with all the money in the bank.... I let him sign the cheques.'
'Oh! Oh! you fool, Charles.'
'He kept getting cheques out of me.'
'How?'
'He said he'd tell the police.'
Clara stamped her foot. Abominable! How abominable people were.... She had to protect Charles, but if she was with him she exposed him to the most fearful risk. Was ever a girl in so maddening a position?
What made it worse was that her attitude towards him had changed. She was no longer so utterly absorbed in him that she could only see life through his eyes. Apart from him she had grown and had developed her own independent existence.
'How much did he take?'
'Two hundred and ten pounds. We can't prosecute him, or he'll tell. He knows that, or he wouldn't have done it.'
'Where is he?'
'I don't know. Laverock met him the other day, and asked him about some committee business. He had the impudence to say that he had resigned, and had come into money, so that his name was now no longer Clott but Cumberland.'
And again Clara found herself in her heart saying, 'It is my fault.'
It was all very well for Charles to believe that the world was governed by magic. Art is magic, but she ought to have known that it is a magic which operates only among a very few, and that the many who are moved only by cunning are always taking advantage of them.... Poor Charles! Betrayed at every turn by his own simplicity, betrayed even by her eagerness to help him!
'It is too bad,' said Clara, with tears in her eyes. 'We can't do anything. Besides I would never send any one to prison, whatever they did. But what a dirty mean little toad.... How did he find out?'
'I don't know. He's the kind of man who hangs about the theatre and borrows five shillings on Friday night.'
Gone was the magic of the stage, gone the power in Charles. He looked just a tired, seedy fellow, more than a little ashamed of himself. He hung his head and muttered,—
'This always happens when I am rich. I've been terribly unhappy about it. I didn't think I could tell you. I went into a shop yesterday to buy a revolver, but I bought a photograph frame instead, because the man was so pleasant that I couldn't bear the idea of his helping me to end my life.... I seem to muddle everything I touch, and yet no one has ever dared to say that I am not a great artist.'
Clara walked away from him across the stage. There had been muddles before, but nothing so bad as this.
As she walked, she found that in watching him she had learned the art of treading the stage, and of becoming that something more than herself which is necessary for dramatic presentation. This sudden acquisition gave her a delighted thrill, and once again her life was flooded with magic, so that this new trouble, like her old, seemed very remote, and she could understand Charles's pretending that he must end his life even to the point of attempting to buy a revolver, which became impossible directly some one spoke pleasantly to him. She felt confident and secure and of the theatre which was a sanctuary that nothing in the outside world could violate.
'Don't worry, Carlo,' she said. 'I'll see that it is put straight.'
'Then you'll come back and stop this nonsense about living alone?'
'WhenThe Tempestis done we'll see about it. I don't want to risk that.The Tempestis what matters now.'
'Are you going to play in it?'
'I don't know yet.... Will you go out into the auditorium and tell me what you think of my voice?'
Charles went up into the dress circle, and Clara, practising her newly-acquired art, turned to an imaginary Ferdinand—more vivid and actual to her now—and declaimed,—
'I do not knowOne of my sex! no woman's face remember,Save, from my glass, mine own; nor have I seenMore that I may call men, than you, good friend,And my dear father: how features are abroad,I am skilless of; but, by my modesty,—The jewel in my dower,—I would not wishAny companion in the world but you.'
She stopped. The vivid, actual Ferdinand of her imagination changed into the form of the lean, hungry-looking man of the book-shop. He turned towards her, and his face was noble in its suffering, powerful and strong to bear the burden upon the mind behind it. Very sweet and gentle was the expression in his eyes, in most pathetic contrast to the rugged hardness which a passionate self-control had shaped upon his features.... Her heart ached under this astonishment that in this phantom she could see and know and love his face upon which in life her eyes had never fallen.
'Go on,' called Charles, from the dress circle.... 'Admirable.... I never thought you could do it.'
'That's enough,' she replied, with a violent effort to shake free of her bewilderment and sweet anguish.
'If I meet him,' she said in her heart, 'I shall love him and there will be nothing else.'
Aloud she said,—
'I must not.'
She had applied herself to the task of furthering Charles's ambition, and until she had succeeded she would not yield, nor would she seek for herself in life any advantage or even any natural fulfilment.
Charles came back in a state of excitement.
'It was wonderful,' he said. 'What has happened to you? Your voice is so full and round. You lose yourself entirely, you speak with a voice that has in it all the colour and beauty and enchantment of my island. You move simply, inevitably, so that every gesture is rhythmical, and like a musical accompaniment to the words.... You'll be an artist. You are an artist. There has been nothing like it since the old days.... Duse could not do more with her voice.'
'I didn't know,' she said. 'I didn't know.'
'But I did,' he cried. 'I did. I knew you would become a wonder.... Bother money, bother Butcher, bother Clott, and damn the committee. Together we shall be irresistible—as we have been. You didn't tell me you were practising. If that is why you want to be alone I have nothing to say against it. I've been a selfish brute.'
She was deeply moved. Never before had Charles shown the slightest thought for her. Human beings as such were nothing to him, but for an artist, as for art, no trouble was too great, no sacrifice too extreme for him.
He seized her hands and kissed them over and over again.
'I've been your first audience,' he said. 'Come out now, and I'll buy you flowers; your room shall be so full of flowers that you can hardly move through them. As for Verschoyle, he shall pay. It shall be his privilege to pay for us while we give the world the priceless treasure that is in us.'
His words rather repelled and hurt her, and in her secret mind she protested,—
'But I am a woman. But I am a woman.'
It hurt her cruelly that Charles should be blind to that, blind to the cataclysmic change in her, blind to her new beauty and to her newly gathered force of character. After all, the magic of the stage was only illusion, a trick that, if it were not a flowering of the deeper magic of the heart, was empty, vain, contemptible, a thing of darkness and cajolery.
'Perhaps it was just an accident,' said Clara.
'Do it again!' said Charles, in a tone of command.
'What?'
'Do it again!'
'I can't.'
'Do it again, I tell you. When you do a thing like that you have to find out how you did it. Art isn't a thing of chance. You must do it again now.'
'No.'
To her horror and amazement he pounced on her, seized her roughly by the shoulders, and shook her until her head rolled from side to side and her teeth chattered. He was beside himself with passion, ruthless, impersonal in his fury to catch and hold this treasure of art which had so suddenly appeared in the child whom hitherto he had regarded as about as important as his hat or his walking-stick.
'By Jove,' he said, 'I might have known it was not for nothing that I fished you out of Picquart's studio....'
'How dare you speak to me like that?'
She knocked his hands away and stood quivering in an outraged fury, and lashed out at him with her tongue.
'I'm not paint that you can squeeze out of a tube,' she said. 'You treat people as though they were just that and then you complain if they round on you.... I know what you want. You want to squeeze out of me what your own work lacks....'
Charles reeled under this assault and his arms fell limply by his side.
'Forgive me,' he said, 'I didn't know what I was doing. I was knocked out with my astonishment and delight.... Really, really I forgot the stage was empty. I thought we were working....'
Clara stared at him. Could he really so utterly lose himself in the play as that? Or was he only persuading himself that it was so? ... With a sudden intuition she knew that in all innocence he was lying to her, and that what had enraged him was the knowledge, which he could never admit, that she was no longer a child living happily in his imagination but a human being and an artist who had entered upon a royal possession of her own. She had outstripped him. She had become an artist without loss of humanity. Henceforth she must deal with realities, leaving him to his painted mummery... She could understand his frenzy, his fury, his despair.
'That will do, Charles,' she said very quietly. 'I will see what can be done about Mr Clott, and whatever happens I will see that you are not harmed.... If you like, you can dine with Verschoyle and me to-night. You can come home with me now, while I dress. I am to meet him at the Carlton and then we are going on to the Opera.'
'Does Verschoyle know?'
'He knows that you are you and that I am I—that is all he cares about... He is a good man. If people must have too much money, he is the right man to have it. He would never let a man down for want of money—if the man was worth it.'
'Ah!' said Charles, reassured. This was like the old Clara speaking, but with more assurance, a more certain knowledge and less bewildering intuition and guess-work.
A few weeks later, with Verschoyle and a poor relation of his, a Miss Vibart Withers, for chaperone, Clara left London in a 60 h.p. Fiat, which voraciously ate up the Bath Road at the rate of a mile every minute and a half.... It was good to be out of the thick heat of London, invaded by foreigners and provincials and turned into a city of pleasure and summer-frocks, so that its normal life was submerged, its character hidden. The town became as lazy and drowsy a spectacle as a field of poppies over which danced gay and brilliant butterflies. Very sweet was it then to turn away from it, and all that was happening in it, to the sweet air and to fly along between green fields and orchards, through little towns, at intervals to cross the Thames and to feel that with each crossing London lay so much farther away. Henley, Oxford, Lechlade, and the Cotswolds—that was the first day, and, breathing the clover-scented air, gazing over the blue plains to the humpy hills of Malvern, Clara flung back her head and laughed in glee.... How wonderful in one day to shake free of everything, to leave behind all trammels!
'No one need have any troubles now,' she said, with the bewitching smile that made all her discoveries so entrancing. 'When people get tied up in knots, they can just get into a car and go away. The world is big enough for everybody.'
'But people love their troubles,' replied Verschoyle. 'I have been looking for trouble all my life, but I can't find it. That's my trouble.'
'Everybody ought to be happy,' she said.
'In their own way. Most people are very happy with their troubles. They will take far more trouble over them than they will over their pleasures or making other people happy.'
'Do you remember the birds and fishes?'
'Do I not? It was the birds and fishes who introduced you to me.'
'I think this was what Charles meant by them—escape, irrelevance, holiday.'
'That's quite true. Nothing ought to be as serious as it is, for nothing is so serious as it looks when you really come to grips with it. Life always looks like a blank wall until you come up to it and then there is a little door which was invisible at a distance.... I found that out when I met you.'
'And did you go through it?'
'Straight through and out to the other side.'
Clara took his hand affectionately, and their eyes met in a happy smile. They were friends for ever, the relationship most perfectly suited to his temperament, most needed by hers.
From that she passed on to a frank discussion of her own situation with regard to Charles, and the hole he was in through the absconding Mr Clott.
'I knew that fellow was a scoundrel,' said Verschoyle. 'He tried to borrow money from me, and to pump me about the form of my horses. How on earth did he ever become secretary to a committee for the furtherance of dramatic art?'
'He turned up. Everything in Charles's life turns up.Iturned up.'
'And is your name really Day?'
'It was my grandfather's name.... I never had any one else. I remember no one else except an Italian nurse, with a very brown face and very white teeth. He died in Paris four years ago. My people were in India.'
'Ah! Families get lost sometimes in the different parts of the British Empire. It is so big, you know. I'm sure the English will lose themselves in it one of these fine days.'
He passed over without a word her position as wife and no wife, but became only the kinder and more considerate. It had eased and relieved her to talk of it. Every impediment to their friendship was removed, but sometimes as they walked through fields he would grip his stick very tight and lash out at a hemlock or a dog-daisy, and sometimes when he was driving he would jam his foot down on the accelerator and send the car whirling along. If they had met Charles walking along the road it would have gone ill with him.
They were six days on their journey up through Shropshire, Cheshire, and the murk of South Lancashire. They stayed in pleasant inns, and made many strange acquaintances, bagmen, tourists, young men with knapsacks on their backs escaping from the big towns, and sometimes they helped these young men over dreary stretches of road.
'The happiest six days of my life,' said Verschoyle, as they approached the mountains. 'I haven't toured in England before. Somehow in London one knows nothing of England. One is bored and one goes over to Homburg or Aix-les-bains. How narrow life is even with a car and a yacht!'
How narrow life could be Clara soon discovered at the Butchers', where London life was simply continued in a lovely valley at the bottom of which lay a little lake shining like a mirror and vividly reflecting the hills above it.
The Butchers had a long, low house in an exquisite garden, theatrically arranged so that the flowers looked as if they were painted and the trees had no roots, but were as though clamped and ironed to the earth. From their garden the very hills had the semblance of a back-cloth.
The house was full of the elegant young men and women who ran in and out of the theatre and had no compunction about interrupting even rehearsals. They chaffed Sir Henry, and fed Lady Butcher with scandal for the pleasure of hearing her say witty biting things, which, as she had no mercy, came easily to her lips. She studiously treated Clara as though she were part and parcel of Verschoyle, and to be accommodated like his car or his chauffeur.... Except as a social asset, Lady Butcher detested the theatre, and she loathed actresses.
As the days floated by—for once in a way the weather in Westmoreland was delicious—it became apparent to Clara that Lady Butcher hated the project of Charles's production ofThe Tempest. She never missed an opportunity of stabbing at him with her tongue. She regarded him as a vagabond.
Living herself in a very close and narrow set, she respected cliques more than persons. Verschoyle was rich enough to live outside a clique, but that a man with a career to make should live and work alone was in her eyes a kind of blasphemy. As for Clara—Lady Butcher thought of her as a minx, a designing actress, one of the many who had attempted to divert Sir Henry from the social to the professional aspect of the theatre, which, in few words, Lady Butcher regarded as her own, a kind of salon which gave her a unique advantage over her rivals in the competition of London's hostessry.
It was the more annoying to Lady Butcher that Clara and Verschoyle should turn up when they did as two Cabinet Ministers were due to motor over to lunch one day, and a famous editor was to stay for a couple of nights, while her dear friends the Bracebridges (Earl and Countess), with their son and daughter, were due for their annual visit.
Distressed by this atmosphere of social calculation, Clara spent most of her time with Verschoyle, walking about the hills or rowing on the lake; but unfortunately she roused the boyish jealousy in Sir Henry, who, as he had 'discovered' her, regarded her as his property, and considered that any romance she might desire should be through him.... He infuriated his wife by preferring Clara to all the other young ladies, and one night when, after dinner, he took her for a moon-light walk, she created a gust of laughter by saying,—
'Henry can no more resist the smell of grease-paint than a dog can resist that of a grilled bone.'
This was amusing but unjust, for Sir Henry regarded his desire for Clara's society as a healthy impulse towards higher things—at least, he told her so as he led her out through the orchard and up the stony path, down which trickled a little stream, to the crag that dominated the house and garden. It was covered with heather and winberries, and just below the summit grew two rowan-trees. So bright was the moon that the colour of the berries was almost perceptible. Sir Henry stood moon-gazing and presently heaved a great sigh,—
'A-a-ah!'
'What a perfect night!' said Clara.
'On such a night as this——'
'On such a night——'
'I've forgotten,' said Sir Henry. 'It is in theMerchant of Venice. Something about moonlight when Lorenzo and Jessica eloped. You would make a perfect Jessica.... I played Lorenzo once.'
Clara wanted to laugh. It was one of the most delightful elements in Sir Henry's character that he could never see himself as old, or as anything but romantically heroic.
'Yes,' he said; 'you have made all the difference in the world. It was remarkable how you shone out among the players in my theatre.... It is even more remarkable among all these other masqueraders in that house down there. All the world's a stage——'
'Oh, no,' said Clara. 'It is beautiful. I didn't know England was so lovely. As we came north in the car I thought each county better than the last—and I forgot London altogether.'
'It is some years since I toured,' said Sir Henry. 'My wife does not approve of it, but there is nothing like it for keeping you up to the mark. The real audiences are out of London. A couple of years' touring would do you a world of good. You shall make your name first.... There aren't any actors and actresses now simply because they won't tour. They want money in London—money in New York—the pity of it is that they get it.'
Clara scrambled up to the highest point of the crag and stood with the gentle wind playing through her thick hair, caressing her parted lips, her white neck, liquefying her light frock about her limbs.
'Oh, my God!' cried Sir Henry, gazing at her enraptured. 'Ariel!'
As she stood there she was caught up in the wonder of the night, became one with it, a beam in the moonlight, a sigh in the wind, a star winking, a little tiny cloud floating over the tops of the mountains. So lightly poised was she that it seemed miraculous that she did not take to flight, almost against nature that she could stand so still. Her lips parted, and she sang as she used to sing when she was a child,—
Come unto these yellow sandsAnd then take hands.'
A little young voice she had, sweet and low, a boyish voice, nothing of woman in it at all.
She leaned forward and gazed over the edge of the crag, and Sir Henry, who was so deeply moved that all his ordinary mental processes were dislocated, thought with a horrid alarm that she was going to throw herself down. Such perfection might rightly end in tragedy, and he thought with anguish of Mann and Verschoyle, thought that they had besmirched and dishonoured this loveliness, thought that this sudden exaltation and abstraction must come from the anguish that was betrayed in her eyes so often and so frequently.
'Take care! Take care!' called Sir Henry.
She leaped down into the heather by his side, and he said,—
'It seems a crime to take you back into the house. What have you to do with whether or no we are asked to the next garden-party in Downing Street? You are Ariel and can put a girdle round the earth.... I am almost afraid of you. Can't we run away and become strolling players? You may think I am to be envied but my life has been a very unhappy one.... I want to help you....'
It was obvious to Clara that he did not know what he was saying, and indeed he was light-hearted and moonstruck, lifted outside his ordinary range of experience. He babbled on,—
'If I could feel that I had done the smallest thing to help you, I should be prouder of it than of any other thing in my career.'
'But I don't want help....'
'Ah! You think so now. But wait three years.... You think an actor can know nothing of life, but who knows more? Has he not in himself to reproduce every fine shade of emotion, the effect of every variety of experience.... The people who know nothing of life are your cloistered artists like Mann, or your Verschoyle drowned in money.... You have not known me yet.'
Really he was getting rather ridiculous with his boyish romanticism. He had been married twice and his two families numbered seven. But Clara, too, was under the spell of the moon, and his gauche response to her mood had touched her.
'Life is a miserable business for a woman,' said Sir Henry. 'I live in dread lest you should be dragged down into the common experience.'
(Did he or did he not know about Charles?)
Clara laughed. This was taking her too seriously.
'Ah, you can laugh now while you are young, but youth attracts, it is drawn into the whirlpool and is lost.... Is there more in you than youth?'
'Much, much more,' said Clara exultantly. 'There has never been anybody like me before.'
'By Heaven!' swore Sir Henry. 'That is true.... You have bewitched me—and we had better be going back to the house.... Will you let me carry you down?'
Without waiting for her permission, he lifted her, and she suffered him to carry her down the last stony path, because her flimsy shoes were already wet through. He did not guess that she had good reason, and his heart thumped in his large bosom.
It had been a night of nights for him. Years of uneasy distraction had melted away. Not even at the height of his success had he felt so confident, so entirely superior to the rest of mankind as both to command and to deserve their homage. In no play had he ever devised a more romantic finale than this in which he carried his conquered sprite—for so he thought her—back to earth. As he put her down, he threw out his chest and turned to the stars as it was his habit to turn to his audiences, and bowed thrice, to the right, to the left, to the centre, with his hand upon his heart.
Verschoyle was very angry with her when she returned.
'You know how these people think of such things,' he said.
'What they think and what I do are very different,' retorted Clara, her eyes shining, her cheeks glowing from the night air. 'It makes him happy, and, if you are happy with me, he doesn't see why he shouldn't be.Pourquoi pas moi aussi? Men are all alike.'
'It is not the same.... What a child you are! Some day you will love and then you will see very differently.... The old fool thinks you are——'
'No. He said I was Ariel. So I am. So I am.... I wonder I never thought of it before. I shall never be a woman as women have been——'
'There have been good women.'
'Tra la la! The good women have done far more harm in the world than all the bad women put together. Lady B is a good woman.'
'A painted tigress.Shewon't forgive you in a hurry. She thinks—that, too.'
'People can't think beyond what they are. You can't expect me to be what other people think.'
'I want you to be yourself.'
'So I am.... You shall take me away in a day or two. I want to see the Bracebridges just for fun,andthe Cabinet Ministers, and then I want to drown their memories one by one in the lakes as we pass them. We are going to see them all, aren't we?'
'I want to get away. I can't bear being with you in this atmosphere of money.'
'Now, now. You promised me you would never behave like a lover.'
'I thought I was behaving like an angry brother.'
She was pleased with him for that. She knew that part of his trouble was due to his being an only son.
The Bracebridges were disappointing: a very dull man, a hard and raffish woman, but apparently to Lady Butcher they were the wonder of all wonders. She and Lady Bracebridge were to each other 'dear Ethel' and 'dearest Madge.' Together they made a single dominant and very formidable personality, which must be obeyed. They flung themselves upon the house-party, sifted the affairs of every member of it, and in three days had arranged for two engagements and one divorce. They commanded Verschoyle—by suggestion—to marry a Mrs Slesinger, who was plain but almost as rich as himself, and in his distress he very nearly succumbed; but Clara swooped in to save him, and found that her position was made almost impossible by whispered tittle-tattle, cold looks, and downright rudeness. She was distinctly left out of picnic and boating parties, and almost in contempt she was partnered with Sir Henry who, after Lady Bracebridge's arrival, was no longer master in his own house.... When the Cabinet Ministers arrived the situation became impossible for they produced chaos. The household was dislocated, and in the confusion Clara packed, had her trunks carried to the garage, and slipped away with Verschoyle.
Said he,—
'These damned politicians can't get off the platform. Did you see how that old fool sawed the air when he talked of Ireland, and did you hear how the other bleated when he mouthed of Poor Law Reform? They're on show—always on show.... So are these infernal lakes. I can't stand scenery that has stared at me for hours in a railway carriage.'
'It doesn't matter,' said Clara. 'You may be unjust to Lady Butcher, but you mustn't be unjust to Rydal.'
'It is so still and out of date.... I can't think of it without thinking of Wordsworth, and I don't want to think of Wordsworth.... Being with you makes me want to get on into the future, and there's something holding us all back.'
All the same, their holiday swept up to a triumphant conclusion, and they forgot the Butchers and their London elegance in going from inn to inn in the lovely valleys, taking the car up and down breakneck hills and making on foot the ascent of Great Gable and Scafell, upon whose summit in the keen air and the gusty wind Clara let fly and danced about, wildly gay, crying out with joy to be so high above the earth, where human beings spied upon each other with jealous eyes lest one should have more happiness than another.
'They can't spoil this,' she said.
'Who?'
'Oh, all the people down there. They can spoil Charles, and you and me and silly old Sir Henry, but they can't spoil this.'
'In Switzerland,' said Verschoyle, 'there are mountains higher than this, and they make railways up them, and at the top of the railways English governesses buy Alpenstocks, and have the name of the mountain burned into the wood.'
'If I were a mountain,' said Clara, 'and they did that to me I should turn into a volcano and burn them all up, all the engineers and all the English governesses.... I'm sure Lady Bracebridge was a governess.'
'Right in once,' said Verschoyle, staring at her with round boyish eyes, as though he half expected her at once to turn into a volcano. With Clara anything might happen, and her words came from so deep a recess of her nature as almost to have the force of a prophecy.
If there is one street that more than another has in it the spirit of London it is Charing Cross Road. It begins with pickles and ends with art; it joins Crosse and Blackwell to the National Gallery. In between the two are bookshops, theatres, and music halls, and yet it is a street without ostentation. No one in Charing Cross Road can be assuming: no one could be other than genial and neighbourly. All good books come there at last to find the people who will read them long after they have been forgotten by the people who only talk about them. Books endure while readers and talkers fade away, and Charing Cross Road by its trade in books keeps alive the continuity of London's life and deserves its fame. The books that reach this haven are for the most part honest, and therefore many a weary soul turns out of the streets where men and women swindle into this place where the thoughts of honest men are piled on shelves, or put out in the open air in boxes, marked twopence, fourpence, sixpence.... A real market this! A fair without vanity. There are pictures to look at in the windows, mementoes of dead artists and writers, and there is a constant stream of people, the oddest mixture to be found anywhere on earth.... Everybody who has nothing very much to do goes to Charing Cross Road to meet everybody who has dropped out of the main stream of humanity to have a look at it as it goes by.
You can buy food in this delectable retreat—the best holiday ground in England—and you can eat it in the ferocious book-shop kept by the mildly-mannered man who called Clara's name blessed, and had her photograph in his little dark room at the back of the shop.
Adnor Rodd always took his holidays in Charing Cross Road, for when he went into the country he worked harder even than he did in London. He wrote plays, and kept himself alive as best he could, because he hated the theatre so much that he could never force himself through a stage door. Silent, taciturn, he went on his way, caring for nothing but his work, and sparing neither himself nor any one else in pursuing it.
He had started in London with money and friends, but work became such a vice with him that he lost both, except just enough to keep him alive—to go on working. Every now and then he was 'discovered' by a playwright, a critic, or a literary man, but as he never returned a compliment in his life 'discovery' never led very far.... A few people knew that there was a strange man, called Rodd, who wrote masterpieces, but simply would not or could not take advantage of the ordinary commercial machinery to turn them into money or fame; but these few raised their eyebrows or wagged their heads when he was mentioned. Poor chap! He was out of the running, and never likely to become a member of the Thespic Club, election to which makes a man a real dramatist, whose name may be considered good for a week's business.
Rodd never thought in terms of business. He thought in terms of human relationships, and out of them composed—never ceased composing—dramas, vivid, ruthless, terrible. It was very bad for him, of course, because it forced him into a strained detachment from the life all around him, and when he met people he was always bent on finding out what they were really thinking, instead of accepting what they wished him to think was in their minds. He could no more do that than he could use his considerable technical powers to concoct the confectionery which in the theatre of those days passed, God save us, for a play. He wanted to come in contact with the dramatic essence of the people he met, but every one withheld it or protected him or herself against him, and so he lived alone. For the sake of his work he discarded the ordinary social personality which his education had taught him to acquire, and he walked through the world exposed, rather terrifying to meet; but so exquisitely sensitive that one acute pleasure—a flower, a woman's smile, a strong man shaking hands with his friend, a lovers' meeting, a real quarrel between two men who hated each other, the attention of a friendly dog—could obliterate all the horror and disgust with which most of what he saw and felt inspired him. He was sure of himself as a wind is sure of itself, but he was without conceit.... When he was very young, he had been discovered by one or two women. That was enough. He knew that the desire of women is not worth satisfying, and he left them alone unless they were in distress, and then he helped them generally at the cost of their thinking he was in love with them. Then he had to explain that he had helped them as he would help a child or a sick man. Generally they would weep and say he was a liar and a deceiver, but he knew what women's tears are worth, and when they got that far left them to prevent them going any further.... But he always had women to look after him, women who were grateful, women who, having once tasted his sympathy, could not do without it. His sympathy was passionate and to some natures like strong drink. Very few men could stand it because it went straight to the secret places of the heart, and men, unlike women, do not care to face their own secrets.
He lived in three rooms at the top of a house in Bloomsbury, one for his books, one for his work, and one for himself—for sleeping and bathing. Unlike most men who are indifferent to the outside world he was clean, because he found that slovenliness impaired his efficiency, and took the edge off his energy. He was as fastidious mentally as a trained athlete is physically.
He accepted good-humouredly the apparently unalterable incompatibility between the theatre and the drama.
A man with a single aim seems mad in a world where aims are scattered, but Rodd suffered a double isolation. Ordinary people regarded him as a cracked fool, because he would not or could not exploit his gifts and personality; while the people who really were cracked dreaded his sanity and the humorous tolerance with which he indulged their little weaknesses.
He enjoyed Charing Cross Road because it was rather like himself: it was shovelled aside and disdained by its ignoble 'betters,' the streets imposed by cosmopolitanism upon the real English London. That London he could find in Charing Cross Road, where there still beat the heart from which Fielding and Dickens had drawn their inspiration, the brave heart that could laugh through all its sufferings and through all the indignities put upon it. In Charing Cross Road he could meet almost any day Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet, Tom Jones and Partridge, Sam Weller and Sairey Gamp, and every day their descendants walked abroad, passed in and out of shops, went about their business, little suspecting that they would be translated into the world of art when Rodd returned from his holiday to his work. He passionately loved this London, the real London, and hated everything that denied it or seemed to deny it. He loved it so greatly that he hardly needed any personal love, and he detested any loyalty which interfered with his loyalty to Shakespeare, Fielding, and Dickens, dramatists all, though Fielding's drama had been too vital for the theatre of his time and had blown it into atoms, so that since his day the actors had had to scramble along as best they could and had done so well that they had forgotten the drama altogether. They had evolved a kind of theatrical bas-relief, and were so content with it that they regarded the rounded figures of dramatic sculpture with detestation.... They dared not make room in their theatre forHedda GablerandJohn Gabriel Borkman, because they destroyed by contrast the illusions with which they maintained their activities.
The Scots bookseller was a great friend of Rodd's, and a loyal admirer, though he did not in the least understand what the strange man was about. Rodd used to talk of the virtue of an ordered world, while the bookseller lived in dreams of Anarchy, men and women left alone so that the good in them could come to the top and create a millennium of kindliness. Rodd's researches into the human heart had revealed to him only too clearly the terror that burns at the sources of human life, but because the bookseller's dreams were dear to him, because they kept him happy and benevolent, Rodd could never bring himself to push argument far enough to disturb them.
One day in this fair summer of our tale, Rodd turned into the bookshop to consume the lunch he had bought at the German Delicatessen-Magasin up the road. He found the bookseller bubbling over with happiness, dusting his books, re-arranging them, emptying large parcels of new books, and not such very subversive books either except in so far as all literature is subversive.
'Hallo!' said Rodd. 'I thought this was the slack season?'
'I'm rich,' retorted the bookseller. 'The dahned publishers are crawling to me. They've had their filthy lucre, and they know I can shift the stuff, and they're on their knees to me, begging me to take their muck by the hundred—at my own price.'
(This was a pardonable exaggeration, but it was long since the bookseller had had so much new stock.)
'If I ever want a change,' said Rodd, 'I'll get you to take me on as your assistant.'
The bookseller's jaw dropped and he stared at Rodd.
'You might do worse,' he said. 'That's the second offer I've had this year.'
'Oh! who made the first?'
'Ah!' The bookseller put his finger to his nose and chuckled. 'Ah! Some one who's in love with me.'
'There are too many books,' said Rodd. 'Too much shoddy.'
He turned away to the shelves where the plays were kept—Shaw, Barker, Galsworthy, Ibsen, Schnitzler, Hauptmann, Tschekov, Andreev, Claudel, Strindberg, Wedekind, all the authors of the Sturm and Drang period, when all over Europe the attempt was made to thrust literature upon the theatre, in the endeavour, as Rodd thought, to break the tyranny of the printed word. That was a favourite idea of his, that the tyranny of print from which the world had suffered so long would be broken by the drama. The human heart alone could break the obsessions of the human mind, otherwise humanity would lose its temper and try to smash them by cracking human heads.... Rodd always thought of humanity as an unity, an organism subject to the laws of organic life. Talk about persons and nations, groups and combinations, seemed to him irrelevant. Humanity had a will, and everything had to comply with it or suffer. At present it seemed to him that the will of humanity was diseased, and that society here in London, as elsewhere, was inert. He escaped into his imagination where he could employ to the full his dramatic energy. On the whole he hated books, but his affection for the Charing Cross Road, and for the bookseller, drew him to the shop dedicated to the efforts of revolutionary idealists, whom he thought on the whole mistaken. He desired not revolution but the restoration of the health of humanity, and like so many others, he had his nostrum—the drama. However, the air was so full of theories, social and political, that he did not expect any one to understand him.
'Have you got Mann's new book?' he asked the bookseller, who produced it: forty plates of Charles's pet designs with rather irrelevant letterpress. Rodd bought it, and that moment Clara entered the shop.
Rodd paid no attention to her. The bookseller left him with his money in his hand, and he stood turning over the pages of Charles's book, and shaking his head over the freakish will o' the wisp paragraphs. Clara spoke, and he stiffened, stared at the books in front of him, turned, caught sight of her profile, and stood gazing in amazement—a girl's face that was more than pretty, a face in which there was purpose, and proof of clear perception.
After her holiday she was looking superbly well. Health shone in her. She moved, and it was with complete unconcern for her surroundings. She lived at once in Rodd's imagination, took her rightful place as of course side by side with Beatrice, Portia, Cordelia, and Sophia Western. His imagination had not to work on her at all to re-create her, or to penetrate to the dramatic essence of her personality, which she revealed in her every gesture.
He could not hear what she was saying, but her voice went thrilling to his heart. He gasped and reeled and dropped Charles Mann's book with a crash.
Clara, who had not seen him, turned, and she, too, was overcome. He moved towards her, and stood devouring her with his eyes, and hers sought his.
'This is Rodd,' said the bookseller. 'Adnor Rodd, a great friend of mine.'
'Rodd,' repeated Clara.
'He is very much interested in the theatre,' said the bookseller.
'I was just looking at Charles Mann's new book.... Will you let me give it you?'
He moved away to pick up the book and came back clutching it, took out his fountain pen and wrote in it in a small, precise hand,—
'To my friend, from Adnor Rodd.'
'My name is Clara Day,' said she,
'You can't have a name yet.... You are just you.'
She understood him. He meant that externals were of no account in the delighted shock of their meeting. As they stood gazing at each other the book-shop vanished, London disappeared, there was nothing but they two on all the earth. Neither could move. The beginning and the end were in this moment. Nothing that they could do could alter it or make the world again as it had been for them.... Consciously neither admitted it, both stubbornly clung to what they had made of their lives.
He still held the book in his hand. She had not put out hers for it. He wrote 'Clara Day,' and he wanted to write it down several times as he did with the names of the persons in his plays, to make certain that they were rightly called.
With a faintly recurrent sense of actuality he thought of his three rooms in Bloomsbury and of the hundred and fifty pounds a year on which he lived, and with a wry smile he handed her the book, took stock of her rich clothes, bowed and turned away.... For his imagination it was enough to have met and loved her in that one moment. She had broken down the intellectual detachment in which he lived: the icy solitude in which so painfully he struggled on was at an end.
So quickly had he moved that she was taken by surprise, and he had reached the threshold of the shop before she ran after him and touched him on the arm.
'Please,' she said. 'You have forgotten one thing—the date.'
He wrote the date in the book, and was for going, but she said,—
'I must know more of you if I am to accept your gift.'
'You talk such perfect English,' he said, marvelling at her. 'People do not talk like that nowadays, but a slipshod jargon.'
'I have lived abroad,' she told him, and without more they walked out into the street together, she hugging the book very dose.
They had walked some distance in silence before he spoke.
'Was it by accident that you were in that shop?'
'Oh, no,' said she. 'The old man is a friend of mine.'
(He noticed that she said 'the old' and not as most people did 'the yold.' It was this perfection in her that made her so incredible. To the very finest detail she was perfect and he knew not whether to laugh or to weep.)
'It is absurd,' he said in his heart, 'it can't happen like this. It can't be true.'
Clara had no thought of anything but to make him open up his mind and heart to her, most easily and painlessly to break the taut strain in him.
They turned into a tea-shop in Coventry Street, and he sat glowering at her. A small orchestra was crashing out a syncopated tune. The place was full of suburban people enjoying their escape into a vulgar excitement provided for them by the philanthropy of Joseph Lyons. The room was all gilt and marble and plentiful electric light. A waitress came up to them, but Rodd was so intent upon Clara that he could not collect his thoughts, and she had to order tea.
'Who are you?' he asked.
'I am an actress at the Imperium.'
He flung back his head and gave a shout of laughter.
'Is it funny?' she asked.
'Very.'
She smiled a little maliciously and asked.—
'Who are you?'
'I'm a queer fish.... I've wasted my life in expecting more from people than they had to give, and in offering them more than they needed.'
'You look tired.'
'I am tired—tired out.... You're not really an actress.'
'I'm paid for it if that makes me one.'
'I mean—you are not playing a part now. Actresses never stop. They take their cues from their husbands and lovers and go on until they drop. Their husbands and lovers generally kick them out before they do that.... The ordinary woman is an actress in her small way, but you are not so at all.... I can't place you. What are you doing in London? You ought not to be in London. You ought to leave us stewing in our own juice.'
The waitress brought them tea and the orchestra flung itself into a more outrageous effort than before.
'Ragtime and you!' he went on. 'They don't blend. Ragtime is for tired brains and jaded senses, for people who have lost all instinct and intuition. What have you to do with them? You will simply beat yourself to death upon their hard indifference.... You are only a child. You should be packed off home.'
'And suppose I have none.'
He shrugged his shoulders.
'That was an impertinence. Forgive me!' He took up the book he had given her. 'This fellow Mann is like all the rest. He wants to substitute a static show for a dynamic and vital performance, to impose his own art upon the theatre. The actors have done that until they have driven anything else out. He wants to drive them out. That is all, but he has great gifts....'
'Please don't talk about other people,' said Clara. 'I want to hear about you. What were you doing in the book-shop?'
He told her then why he went to the Charing Cross Road, to find a holiday which would make life tolerable; she described her holiday touring through the country with the glorious conclusion in the Lakes. He looked rather gloomy and shook his head,—
'That wouldn't suit me. I like to go slowly and to linger over the things that please me, to drink in their real character. It is pleasant to move swiftly, but all this motor-car business seems to me to be only another dodge—running away from life.... I ought to do it if I were true to my temperament, but I love my job too much. I'm an intellectual, but I can't stand by and look on, and I can't run away.'
Clara had never met any one like him before. There was such acute misery in his face, and his words seemed only to be a cloud thrown up to disguise the retreat he was visibly making from her. She would not have that. She was sure of him. This attitude of his was a challenge to her. The force with which he spoke had made Charles and even herself seem flimsy and fantastic, and she wanted to prove that she was or could be made as solid, as definite and precise as himself.
She knew what it was to be driven by her own will. Her sympathy was with him there. He was driven to the point of exhaustion.
'I've been trying to create the woman of the future,' he said. 'Ibsen's women are all nerves. What I want to get is the woman who can detach herself from her emotional experience and accept failure, as a man does, with a belief that in the long run the human mind is stronger than Nature. If instincts are baffled, they are not to be trusted. Women have yet to learn that.... When they learn it, we can begin to get straight.'
It did not seem to matter whether she understood him or not. He had her sympathy, and he was glad to talk.
'That seems to be the heart of the problem. But it is a little disconcerting, when you have been trying to create a woman, to walk into a bookshop and find her.'
'How do you know?' she asked. 'I may be only acting. That is what women do. They find out by instinct the ideal in a man's mind and reproduce it.'
He shook his head.
'All ideals to all men? ... You have given the game away.'
'That might only be the cleverest trick of all.'
For a moment he was suspicious of her, but this coquetry was noble and designed to please and soothe him.
'I'm in for a bad time,' he said simply. 'Things have been too easy for me so far. I gave myself twenty years in which to produce what I want and what the world must have.... Things aren't so simple as all that.'
'Do drink your tea. I think you take everything too hardly. People don't know that they are indifferent. There are so many things to do, so many people to meet, they are so busy that they don't realise that they are standing still and just repeating themselves over and over again.'
'Damn the orchestra!' said Rodd. The first violin was playing a solo with muted strings. 'If people will stand this, they will stand anything. It is slow murder.'
'Do believe that they like it,' replied Clara.
'Slow murder?'
'No. The—music.'
'Same thing.' He laughed. 'Oh, well. You have robbed me of my occupation. When shall we meet again?'
'To-morrow?'
'To-morrow. You shall see how I live— If you can spare the time I would like to take you to a concert. I always test my friends with music.'
'Even the New Woman?'
His eyes twinkled and a smile played about his sensitive lips.