Lord Verschoyle had imagined that by making for Art he would be able to shake free of predatory designs. It was not long before he discovered his mistake and that he had plunged into the very heart of the Society which he desired to avoid, for the Imperium, as used by Lady Butcher and Lady Bracebridge, was a powerful engine in the politico-financial world which dominated London. Verschoyle in his simplicity had seen the metropolis as consisting of purposeful mammas and missish daughters bearing down upon him from all sides. Now he discovered that there was more in it than that and that marriage was only one of many moves in a complicated game.... Lady Bracebridge had a daughter. Lady Butcher had a son whom she designed for a political career, upon which he had entered as assistant secretary to an under-secretary. Perceiving that Verschoyle easily lost his head, as in his apparent relations with Clara Day, they designed to draw him into political society where heads are finally and irrevocably lost.... He loathed politics and could not understand them, but young Butcher haunted him, and Lady Bracebridge cast about him a net of invitations which he could find no way of evading. They justified themselves by saying that it was necessary to save him from Clara, and he found himself drawn further and further away, and more and more submitted to an increasing pressure, the aim of which seemed to be to commit him to supporting the Imperium and the Fleischmann group which had some mysterious share in its control.... He knew enough about finance to realise that there was more in all this than met the eye, and upon investigation he found that the Fleischmann group were unloading Argentines all over monied London, and in due course he was offered a block of shares which, after an admirable dinner at the Bracebridges, he amiably accepted.
The network was too complicated for him to unravel, but, as the result of putting two and two together, he surmised that the Imperium must have been losing rather more than it was worth to the Fleischmann group, and that therefore sacrifice must be offered up. He was the sacrifice. He did not mind that. It would infuriate his trustees when at last he had to give them an account of this adventure, but he did object to Charles and Clara being used to make a desperate bid to revive the languishing support of the public.
Charles and Clara were so entirely innocent of all intrigue. They gave simply what was in them without calculation of future profit, and with the most guileless trust in others, never suspecting that they were not as simple as themselves. Therefore Verschoyle cursed his own indolence which had committed him both to the Imperium and the Fleischmann group.
As he pondered the problem, he saw that Charles and Clara could be dropped, and probably would be as soon as it was convenient. The real controller of the Imperium was Lady Bracebridge, whose skill in intrigue was said to be worth ten thousand a year to Sir Julius Fleischmann. She played upon Lady Butcher, Lady Butcher played upon Sir Henry, who, with Mr Gillies crying 'Give, give,' was between the upper and the nether millstone, and could only put up a sham fight.... Verschoyle understood, too late, thatThe Tempestwas to be produced not to present Clara and Charles to the British public, but to capture himself. Like a fool, in his eagerness to help Clara, he had let himself be captured, and now he thought he owed her amends.... He did not know how difficult the situation had become. The danger point, as he saw the problem, was her position with regard to Charles, who, fortunately, respected her wishes and made no attempt to force her hand. All the same there the awkward fact was and at any moment might trip her up.
Verschoyle did not mind a scandal, and he did not care a hang whether Charles went to prison or not. It might give him the instruction in the elementary facts of existence which he needed to make him learn to begin at the beginning instead of the middle or the end.... What Verschoyle dreaded was a sudden shock which might blast the delicate bud of Clara's youth, which to him was far more precious than any other quality, and the only thing which in all his life had moved him out of his timid dilettantism. To him it was a more valuable thing than the whole of London, and compared with its vivid reality the Imperium, with its firm hold on the affections of the public, and its generation of advertising behind it, was a blown bubble.
He had tea with her on the day after her supper with Sir Henry, and found her disastrously altered, hurt, and puzzled.
'What is the matter?' he asked. 'Rehearsals not going well?'
'Oh, yes. They are going very well.... But I am worried about Charles. He has been borrowing money again.'
'Will you be happy again if I promise to look after Charles?'
'He ought not to expect to be looked after. He is very famous now, and should be able to make money.'
'Surely, like everything else, it is a matter of practice. You don't expect him to beat Sir Henry at his own game.'
'No-o,' she said. 'But I think I did expect Charles's game to beat Sir Henry's.'
'Surely it has done so.'
'No.'
They were in her rooms, which were now most charmingly furnished; bright, gay, and delicate in colouring, tranquil and cosy with books.
'Has anything happened?'
She told him.
'I thought it was going to be so simple. I felt that Charles and I were irresistible, and that we should conquer the theatre and make people admit that he is—what he is. Nothing can alter that. But it isn't simple at all. Other people want other things. They go on wanting the horrible things they have always wanted, and they expect us to help them to procure them. They don't understand. They think we want the same things.... I never thought I should be so unhappy. When it comes to the point they won't let the real things in people be put before the public.'
'Oh, come. He is just a vain old man who gets through his position what he could never have got for himself.'
'No, no, no,' she protested. 'It does mean what I say. It has made me hate the theatre and understand why Charles ran away from it.... Only, having forced him so far, what can I do? I have hurt him far more than he has hurt me. He was quite happy drifting from town to town abroad, and it was the life I had been brought up to, because my grandfather ran away from England, too. It wouldn't have mattered there how many wives Charles had in England.... But I wanted to see for myself, and I didn't want him to be wasted.... I can see perfectly well that Sir Henry wants if possible to discredit him and to prove that his ideas won't work.... We've all been very silly. These people are too clever for us. He's got your money and Charles's genius, and neither of you can raise a finger.'
Verschoyle looked rueful. He could not deny it.
'It's that damned old Bracebridge,' he said. 'She doesn't care a twopenny curse for art or for the public. She and her lot want any money that is floating loose and the whole social game in London has become a three-card trick in their hands. The theatre and newspapers are just the sharper's patter.'
Clara writhed.
'You can't do anything but go on,' he said. 'You are bound to get your success and they can't deny that. The old man knows that. Hence the trick to get you away from Charles.... If you succeed you'll pull Charles through, and—we can buy off anybody who wants to make trouble. I'll buy the Bracebridges, if necessary. I'm not particularly proud of my money. It comes from land for which I do absolutely nothing, but it's better than Fleischmann money which is got by the trickery of a lottery.'
'She's a horrible old woman,' said Clara.
'She intends that I shall marry her hen-brain of a daughter.... If the worst came to the worst, my dear, you could marry me.'
Clara was enraged. It infuriated her that he, of all people, whom she had so entirely trusted, should so far forget himself as to propose so trite and sentimental a solution. He could not help teasing her.
'It would save me, too,' he said. 'And as Lady Verschoyle you could give these people a Roland for their Oliver every time.'
'But I want to ignore them,' she said. 'Why won't you see that I don't want to win with my personality but with my art. That should be the irresistible thing.'
'It would be if they resisted it, but they don't. They ignore it.... I can't think of anything else, my dear. They've got my money: ten thousand in the Imperium and twenty in Argentinos, and they are using my name for all they are worth.'
'And if I hadn't asked you to stay after the birds and fishes it wouldn't have happened.'
'After all, it hasn't come to disaster yet.'
'But it will. It is all coming to a head, and Charles will have to be the one to suffer for it.'
'I promise you he shan't. He shall have a dozen committees and all the birds and fishes he requires.'
She could not help laughing. Perhaps, after all, her fears were exaggerated, but she dreaded Charles's helpless acquiescence in the plight to which he had been reduced by Mr Gillies's refusal to advance him a penny outside the terms mentioned in the contract.
'It certainly looks to me,' said Verschoyle, 'as if they wanted to break him. It wouldn't be any good my saying anything. They would simply point to their contract and shrug their shoulders at Charles's improvidence. How much did Mr Clott get away with?'
'A great deal. He had several hundreds in blackmail before he went. That is why we can't prosecute.'
Verschoyle whistled.
'It is a tangled skein,' he said. 'You'd much better marry me. I won't expect you to care for me.'
'Don't be ridiculous——'
There came a heavy thudding at the door, and Clara jumped nervously to her feet. Verschoyle opened the door, and Charles swept in like a whirlwind. His long hair hung in wisps about his face, his hat was awry, his cuffs hung down over his hands, his full tie was out over his waistcoat, and in both hands he held outstretched his walking stick and a crumpled piece of paper. He dropped the stick and smoothed the paper out on the table, and, in an almost sobbing voice, he said,—
'This has come. It is a wicked plot to ruin me. She demands a part inThe Tempestor she will inform the police.... O God, chicken, that was a bad day when you made me marry you.'
Verschoyle picked up his stick and, beside himself with exasperated fury, laid about the unhappy Charles's shoulders and loins crying,—
'You hound, you cur, you filthy coward! You should have told her! You should have told her! You knew she was only a child!'
Charles roared lustily, but made no attempt to defend himself, although he was half a head taller than Verschoyle and twice as heavy. He merely said,—
'Oo-oh!' when a blow got home, and waited until the onslaught was over. Then he rubbed himself down and wriggled inside his clothes.
Clara stood aghast. It was horrible to her that this should have happened. Blows were as useless as argument with Charles.... He had done what he had done out of kindliness and childish obedience and, looking to motives rather than to results, could see no wrong in it.
Verschoyle was at once ashamed of himself.
'I lost my temper,' he said, and Charles, assured that the storm was over, smiled happily, ran his hands through his hair and said,—
'Do you think Sir Henry would give her a part?'
Verschoyle flung back his head and shouted with laughter. Such innocence was a supreme joke, especially coming after the serious conversation in which he and Clara had aired their fears as to the result of their incursion into theatrical politics.
'She used to be quite pretty,' added Charles. 'What delightful rooms you have, my dear. They're not so warm as my ham and beef shop.'
'Listen to me, Charles,' said Verschoyle. 'This is serious. I don't care about you. Nothing could hurt you. I don't believe you know half the time what is going on under your nose, but it is vitally serious for Clara. This business must be stopped.... If we can't buy these people off then I'll give you two hundred to clear out.'
'Clear out?' faltered Charles, 'but—myTempestis just coming on. I'm——'
Verschoyle took up the letter and noted the address, one of the musical comedy theatres.
'Have you heard from Mr Clott lately?'
'No. His name is Cumberland now, you know. He came into money. He said he would come back to me when I had my own theatre.'
'Theatre be damned. I wanted to know if he's still blackmailing you.'
'Blackmail? Oh, no.'
'Don't you mind people blackmailing you?'
'If people are made like that.'
'Ah!' Verschoyle gave an indescribable gurgle of impatience. 'Look here, Mann, do try to realise the position. You can't get rid of this woman whatever she does because you have treated marriage as though you could take a wife as if it were no more than buying a packet of cigarettes.'
'I have never thought of Clara as my wife.'
'How then?'
'As Clara,' said Charles simply. 'She is a very great artist.'
Verschoyle was baffled, but Clara forgave Charles all his folly for the sake of his simplicity. It was true. The mistake was hers. What he said was unalterably true. She was Clara Day, an artist, and he had loved her as such. As woman he had not loved her or any other.... What in the ordinary world passed for love simply did not exist for him at all.
She turned to Verschoyle.
'Please do what you can for us,' she said. 'And Charles, please don't try to think of it in anybody else's way but your own. I won't let them send you to prison. They don't want to do that. They would much rather have you great and powerful so as to bleed you....'
'It has been very wonderful since you came, chicken,' he said. 'I'm ten times the man I was. It seems so stupid that because we went into a dingy office and gabbled a few words we shouldn't be able to be together.... I sometimes wish we were back in France or Italy in a studio, with a bird in a cage, and you dancing about, making me laugh with happiness....'
'I'll see my lawyer,' said Verschoyle.
'For Heaven's sake, don't!' cried Clara. 'Once the lawyers get hold of it, they'll heap the fire up and throw the fat on it.'
'I'm sorry I forgot myself.... You're a good fellow, Charles, but so damned silly that you don't deserve your luck.'
They shook hands on it and Verschoyle withdrew, leaving Charles and Clara to make what they could of the confusion in which they were plunged.... Charles's way out of it was simply to ignore it. If people would not or could not live in his fancy world, so much the worse for them. He did not believe that anything terrible could happen to him simply because, though calamities of the most serious nature had befallen him, he had hardly noticed them. He could forget so easily. He could withdraw and live completely within himself.
He sat at the table and began to draw, and was immediately entirely absorbed.
'Don't you feel it any more than that, Charles?' she asked.
'If people like to make a fuss, let them,' he said. 'It is their way of persuading themselves that they are important.... If they put me in prison, I should just draw on the walls with a nail, and the time would soon go by. The difference between us and them is that they are in a hurry and we are not. There won't be much left of myTempestby the time they've done with it.... The electricians have secret instructions from Butcher. There was nothing about lighting in my contract, so it is to be his and not mine, as if a design could stand without the lighting planned for it.... There are to be spot-lines on Sir Henry and Miranda and you, if he is still pleased with you....'
Charles was talking in a cold, unmoved voice, but she knew that there must have been a furious tussle. She was up in arms at once,—
'It is disgraceful!' she cried. 'What is the good of his pretending to let you work in his theatre if you can have nothing as you wish it?'
'He believes in actors,' said Charles, 'People with painted faces and painted souls, people whose minds are daubed with paint, whose eyes are sealed with it, whose ears are stopped with it....'
'Am I one of them?' she asked plaintively.
'No! Never! Never!' he said, looking up from his drawing. 'They'll turn us into a success, chicken, but they won't let us do what we want to do.... I shan't go near the place again. But you are Ariel, and without you there can be noTempest.'
'I'll go through with it,' she said, her will setting. 'I'll go through with it, and I'll make nonsense of everything but you.... You've done all you can, Charles. Just go on working. That's the only thing, the only thing....'
As she said these words, she thought of Rodd with an acute hostility that amounted almost to hatred. It was the meeting with him that had so confounded all her aims, that sudden plunge into humanity with him that had so exposed her to love that even Verschoyle's tone had changed towards her.... With Charles, love was as impersonal as a bird's song. It was only a call to her swift joy and claimed nothing for himself, though, perhaps, everything for his art. That was where he was so baffling. He expected the whole world to accept service under his banner, and was so confident that in time it would do so that no rebuff ruffled him.
Clara was tempted to accept his point of view, and to run all risks to serve him; but she realised now, as he did not, the forces arrayed against him. There was no blinking the fact that what the Butcher-Bracebridge combination detested was being forced to take him seriously: him or anything else under the sun. Even the public upon which they fawned was only one of several factors in their calculations.
'It will all come right, Charles,' she said. 'I am sure it will all come right. We won't give in. They have diluted you——'
'Diluted?' he exclaimed. 'Butchered!'
She admired him for accepting even that, but, in spite of herself, it hurt her that he still had no thought for her, but to him only artistic problems were important. The problems of life must be left to solve themselves. She could not help saying,—
'You ought not to leave everything to me, Charles.'
'You can handle people. I can't. I thought I was going to be rich, but there's no money. And even if this affair is a success I shall be ashamed of it.... I think I shall write to the papers and repudiate it. But it is the same everywhere. People take my ideas and vulgarise them. Actors are the same everywhere. They will leave nothing to the audience. They want to be adored for the very qualities they have lost.'
'You don't blame me, then?'
'Blame? What's the good of blaming any one. It doesn't help. It makes one angry. There is a certain pleasure in that, but it doesn't help.'
It was brought home to her, then, that all her care for his helplessness was in vain. He neither needed nor looked for help. It was all one to him whether he lived in magnificence in a furnished house or in apartments over a cook-shop.
'I've a good mind to disown the whole production now,' he said.
'No. No. They will do all they can to hurt you then.... I think they know.'
'Know what?'
'That you have a wife.'
He brought his fist down with such a crash on the frail table that it cracked right across, and Clara was sickeningly alarmed when she saw his huge hands grip the table on either side and rend it asunder. There was something terrible and almost miraculous in his enormous physical vitality, and his waste of it now in such a petty act of rage forced her to admit that which she had been attempting to suppress, the thought of Rodd, and she was compelled now to compare the two men. So she saw Charles more clearly, and had to acknowledge to herself how fatally he lacked moral force. She trembled as it was made plain to her that the old happy days could never come again, and that the child who had believed in him so implicitly was gone for ever. She had the frame, the mind, the instinct of a woman, and these things could no longer be denied.
When his rage was spent, she determined to give him one more chance,—
'We can win through, Charles. We have Verschoyle backing us. I accept my responsibility, and I will be a wife to you.'
'For God's sake, don't talk like that. I want you to be as you were, adorable, happy, free.'
She shook her head slowly from side to side.
Charles, offended, went out. She heard him go blundering down the stairs and out into the street.
She turned to her couch by the window and lay looking at the sun setting behind the roofs, chimneys, and towers of London. Amethyst and ruddy was the sky: smoked yellow and amber: blue and green, speckled with little dark clouds. She drank in its beauty, and lost herself in the dying day, aching at heart because there was nowhere in humanity a beauty of equal power in which she could lose herself, but everywhere barriers of egoism, intrigue, selfish calculation.... She thought of the little bookseller in the Charing Cross Road.... 'Doing good to others is doing good to yourself....' Ay, but make very sure that you are doing good and not well-intentioned harm.
She had meant to help Charles, had sacrificed herself to him, and look what had come of it! Deep within her heart she knew that she had been at fault, and that the mischief had been done when she had imposed her will on him.... As a child she had been brought up in the Catholic faith, and she had still some remnants of a religious conscience, and to this now she whispered that this was the sin against the Holy Ghost, for one person to impose his will on that of another.
At the same time, in his attic, Rodd was pacing up and down his empty room, surveying the impotence to which he had reduced both his life and his work by his refusal to accept the social system of his time. His work was consciously subversive, and therefore unprofitable: his life was nothing. He was a solitary in London, as though he spoke a language which no one understood. So indeed he did. His words had meanings for him to which no one else had the smallest clue, for they referred rather to his imagined world than to any actuality.
Hitherto that had troubled him not at all. Spinoza, Kant, Galileo had all talked a language unintelligible to their contemporaries, and with how many had Nietzsche been able to converse? The stories had it that there was one butcher and he was mad.
Groping with his imagination into the vitals of the society into which he had been born, Rodd had consoled himself with the assurance that a cataclysm would come to smash the odious system by which the old enslaved the young, and that then there would be a cleaner atmosphere in which his ideas could live, and his words would be intelligible to all, because in it that deeper consciousness which was released in his imagined world would come into play to sweep away all falsehoods and stale ideas.... But now the cataclysm had come within himself, and he was brought to doubt and self-examination. Had he not denied too much? Had he not carried abnegation too far? Had he not thwarted powers in himself which were essential even to his impersonal purpose? Was it paradoxically true that a man must be a person before he can be impersonal? His empty room, his books, his pile of manuscript! What a life! Had he after all been only a coward? Had he only shrunk into this silence to avoid the pain and boredom of reiteration?
At first his concern was all with the havoc wrought in his work from the moment when Clara swept into his imagination, but he was soon compelled to brush that aside and to grapple with the more serious fact that she had crept into his heart, which for the first time was active and demanding its share in his being. Then arose the horror that it was repelled by what it found in his imagination, cold, solitary, tortured souls, creatures who should be left to eke out their misery in private solitude, who had nothing to justify their exhibition to the world, who shamelessly reproached their fellows for the results of their own weakness, wretched clinging women, men hard as iron in their egoism.... His heart could not endure it, but until his heart had flooded his vision with its warmth he could not move, could come to no decision, except that he must leave the marvellous girl unmolested.
The furious will that had animated him through all his solitary years resented this intrusion, and was in revolt against the reason and the logic of his heart. That will in him had reduced the social system to its logical end, the destruction of the young by the old, and would allow his creative faculty no other material. It must have nothing but a bleak world of bitterness, and this it had imposed upon both his happy temperament and his generous heart, so that even in life he had been able to exercise nothing but a rather feeble kindness. His will had been to hold up to the world a picture of the end to which it must come, since splendour wrung from desolation must end in desolation.
And suddenly his will was defied by this amazing girl, all youth, all joy, revealing the eternal loveliness of the human spirit that endures though Empires fade away and societies come to chaos.
Very, very slowly, his will, which drew its force from the hypnotic influence of horror, was thrust back, and light crept into his imagined world, flowers blossomed in it, trees swayed in the wind, larks went soaring above green hills blazing with yellow gorse, birds hopped to their nests and sang, dogs barked and gambolled with delight—all his frozen memories slowly melted, and sweet and simple pleasures came to view to make a setting meet for Clara Day. And he remembered simple people with a steady kindness, people like the little bookseller who knew their world but believed in its redeeming goodness, people like a woman who had once nursed him through a terrible illness and had never ceased to pray for him, families where in his lonely youth in London he had been welcome—all these he remembered and grouped round Clara to make a better and a simpler world.
When his agony had run its course, and his old hypnotic will was broken, he told himself that he must be content that Clara should be the mistress of his imagination, since he had wrecked his own life and had nothing to offer her. Obviously she had found the world good. Nothing in her was theatrical, nothing baffled. He must reconcile himself to the acceptance of those two days with her as in themselves perfect, sufficient, and fruitful. Indeed, what need was there of more? They had met as profoundly as they could ever hope to meet. She would marry her lord, and gather about herself all the good and pleasant things of the earth, and he could return to his work and build it up anew.
With his rather absurd tendency to generalise from his personal experience he told himself that as youth and joy had been liberated from his imagined world, so also would they be in the world of actuality. His drooping hopes revived and a new ambition was kindled in him. He paced less rapidly to and fro in his empty room, slowed down day by day until he stopped, sat at his table and plunged once more into work. His arrogance reasserted itself, and he told himself—as was indeed the case—that he could extract more from a hint of experience than the ordinary man could from an overwhelming tragedy.
As he worked, he came more and more to regard his encounter with Clara as a holiday adventure. The Charing Cross Road was to him what Paris or the seaside was to the ordinary worker. The episode belonged to his holiday. It was nothing more, and must be treated as though it had happened to some other man: it must be smiled at, treasured for its fragrance, blessed for its fertility.... With the new weapon it had given him he would return to tobacco and paper, the materials of his existence.
He saw her name in the papers, her photograph here and there. Oh, well, she belonged to that world. No doubt she would amuse herself with theatrical success before she fell back upon the title and wealth which were laid at her feet.
However, convinced though he was of his renunciation, he could not stay away from the bookshop and went there almost every day in the hope of meeting her.
One evening as he returned home he met Verschoyle on the doorstep of his house, and could not refrain from speaking to him.
'Excuse me,' he said, 'I have seen you sometimes in the bookshop in Charing Cross Road.'
'Indeed?' replied Verschoyle, who was looking anxious and worried.
'Yes. I have seen you there with Miss Day.'
Verschoyle was alert and suspicious at once. He scanned this strange individual but was rather puzzled.
'Do you live here?' he asked.
'On the top floor,' replied Rodd, 'on the top floor—alone—I thought you might have been to see me.'
'No, no. I don't know you.'
'My name is Rodd.'
That conveyed nothing to Verschoyle.
'I had the pleasure of meeting Miss Day at the bookshop. I thought she might have mentioned it.'
'No.... I have been to see a Miss Messenger on the third floor. Do you know her?'
'Slightly.'
'You know nothing about her?'
'Nothing, except that she had a child that died.... I'm afraid I didn't even know her name. I don't bother myself much about my neighbours.'
'Thank you,' said Verschoyle. 'Good-night.'
Rodd let himself in, his curiosity working furiously at this strange combination of persons. What on earth could be the link between Verschoyle and the shabby, disreputable ménage on the third floor?... His heart answered ominously: 'Clara.'
He walked slowly up the dark, uncarpeted stairs, and, as he was at the bend below the third floor, he heard a shrill scream—a horrid scream, full of terror, loathing, contempt. He rushed up to the door of the third floor flat and found it open, stood for a moment, and heard a man's voice saying,—
'You shall, you sly cat. Give it me and you shall do as I tell you.'
'No, no, no!' screamed the woman. 'Mother!'
And another woman's voice, cruel, and harsh, said,—
'Do as he tells you, and don't be a fool!'
There was a scuffle, a fall, a man's heavy breathing, a gurgling sound of terror and suffocation. Rodd walked into the flat, and found the woman who waited for him on the stairs lying on the ground, clutching a bundle of bank-notes, while a little, mean-looking man was kneeling on her chest, half throttling her, and trying to force the notes out of her hand. The woman's mother was standing by shrieking aloud and crying,—
'Do as he tells you, you b—— fool! He knows what's what. He's got these blighters in a corner, and he'll make them pay.'
Rodd flung himself on the man, whom he recognised as the creature he and Clara had met on the stairs. He picked him up and threw him into a corner, where he lay, too terrified to move. The woman lay back moaning and rolling her eyes, almost foaming at the mouth. Her bosom heaved and she clutched the notes in her hand more tightly to her.... Rodd turned to the other two, and said,—
'Get out....'
They obeyed him, and he knelt by the woman and reassured her.
'Come now,' he said, 'out with the whole story before you've begun to lie to yourself about it.'
'It's my own money,' she gasped; 'I don't want to do any more. It's all fair and square, if he's paid. If a feller pays, it's all fair and square.'
Rodd accepted the soundness of this rudimentary ethic.
'He wanted half and half, but it's my own money. I signed a paper for it, and I'm not going back on my word. He wants me to. He wants me to go into the Imperium so that he can get on to some of the swells....'
The Imperium? Rodd determined that he would have the whole story out. He left her for a moment and locked the door. Then he lifted her into a chair—it was a flashy furniture-on-the-hire-system room—gave her a dose of brandy and began to ply her with questions,—
'Do you feel better?'
'Much better. I like being with you. You're so quiet. You'd understand a girl, you would. I've often wanted to come and tell you.... It fair knocked me silly when I saw you with her.'
'With whom?'
'Charley's girl.'
'Whose?'
'Charley's. Charley Mann's. He's my husband.'
Rodd was silent for some moments while he took this in.
'Who is this other—man?' asked Rodd kindly, beginning slowly to piece the story together.
'That's Claude.... He was a lodger of mother's before she went broke and had to come to live with me. He never let me alone. I wanted to go straight, I did really.... Charley's not bad, and I thought I should never see him again. I never thought he would make money. I never thought we should see him swanking it in the papers, or I'd never have had a word to say to Claude. I wouldn't really. Only Charley getting married to the other girl——'
It struck Rodd like a blow in the face. Kitty did not mark the effect of her story, and was not concerned with it. All she felt was relief in the telling.
'I wanted money to send mother out of England. I couldn't stand it any more. If it hadn't been for her there wouldn't have been Claude, and a girl at the theatre can have a good time on her own nowadays even with a kiddie. I've often wanted to tell you.'
'Does she know?'
'Charley's girl? Yes. She knows. It's a nice mix-up. Isn't it? And Charley's not bad. He'll just lose you same as he would his hat. No offence meant.'
She laughed hysterically.
'Who gave you the money?'
'A swell.'
'To keep your mouth shut?'
'Yes. Charley would have to go to prison. Claude's been in prison. That's why he'd like Charley to go. Everybody who's been to prison is like that. It makes them sly and hard.... But I say that Charley's paid: six hundred. I'd never have got that out of him if I'd stayed with him, would I?'
'I suppose not.... If there's any more trouble will you come to me?'
'I'd love to,' she said, perking up and casting at him the sorrowful languishing glances with which she had pursued him for so long. 'Claude says he's pushed her on so quick and he ought to have done the same for me.... Claude was at their wedding. I didn't know him then. He's a friend of mother's. We thought he had money but he hasn't got a bean.'
'I'll deal with Claude,' said Rodd. 'And if there is any more trouble, mind you come to me.'
'It was all after my baby died,' said Kitty, as if to excuse herself, but Rodd had accepted the story, and had no thought of excuse or forgiveness. His thought was all for Clara.
How comic it was that he should have given her Mann's book! Did she love Mann? She must have done. She could not have married him else.... But then what was Verschoyle to her, that he should have paid so large a sum in hush-money? A furious jealousy swept away what was left of Rodd's intellectual world and released at last his passions. His mind worked swiftly through the story, picking it up in time with every thread.
Was she only an actress? Was the perfection which he had worshipped a figment, a projection of herself in the character most pleasing to his idealism? Impossible! There can be no feigning of purity, honesty, joy. That is where the pretences of humanity collapse. In such a pretence as that simulated passion—the ultimate baseness, breaks down, creates no illusion, and is foiled.
But on the face of it, what an appalling story! It brought him violently to earth. He could not move, but sat staring at the woman, wanting to tell her that she lied, but knowing that she had spoken according to the truth of the letter. Of the truth of the spirit she could most patently know nothing. Her world was composed of dull facts and smouldering emotions. She could know nothing of the world where emotions flamed into passion to burn the facts into golden emblems of truth. And that was Clara's world: the world in which for two days he had been privileged to dwell, a world in which soul could speak to soul and laugh at all the confusion of fact and detail in which they must otherwise be ensnared.... Mann, Verschoyle, a swift success in the theatre—the facts were of the kind that had induced the horror in which until he met her he had lived. His meeting with her had dispelled his horror, but the facts remained. He in his solitude might ignore them and dream on, but could she? Surely he owed it to her to offer her what through her he had won.... And then—to buy off the wretched woman, surely she could never have submitted to that!
He began to think of Charles Mann with a blistering, jealous hatred.
'I think I'd have killed myself,' said Kitty, 'if it had gone on. I don't wish them any harm now that he's paid up.... I wouldn't have said a word about it to any one, only she's so young. It did give me a bit of a shock, and Charles getting on, too. He's quite gray and has a bit of a stomach. I never thought he'd be the one to get fat. I'm all skin and bone. Look at my arms.'
Rodd left her. When he opened the door he was relieved to find that the unpleasant Claude had gone. Mrs Messenger was sitting by the fire in the front room, her skirts tucked up about her knees, and a glass of port on the mantelpiece. She turned her head with a leer and said,—
'Good luck! I always thought she was keen on you.... It's time she settled down. She was born to be respectable, and to look after a man. That's all most girls are fit for. But in the theatre a girl's got to look after number one or go down and out.'
The old woman with the painted face and dyed hair made Rodd's flesh creep. She seemed to him a symbol of all the evil in the world, decay, disruption, corruption, and with a flash of inspiration he discerned in her the source of all this pitiful tangle of lies. A tender sympathy entirely new to him took possession of his faculties and armed with this he determined that he would not fail in whatever part he was called upon to play in the drama of Clara's life.
He said to the old woman,—
'We have been talking it over. We have decided to book you a passage to Canada and to give you a hundred pounds with which to keep yourself alive until you find work to do.'
'What?' she said, 'me leave London? Dear old London, dear old Leicester Square and the theatres? And leave you to do what you like with my daughter, you dirty dog? I've seen her nosing round on the stairs after you, a feller that lives on bread-and-cheese and grape-nuts. I know your sort, you dirty, interfering blackguard. You've never given a girl as much as a drink in your life.'
'All the same,' said Rodd, 'your passage will be booked, and if Mr Claude What's-his-name shows his face here there'll be a neck broken on the stairs.'
He walked out and heard the old woman gulp down a glass of port and say,—
'Well, I'm damned!'
Then, as he moved upstairs to his own room he heard her screaming,—
'Kitty, you filthy little claw-hammer——'
The door was slammed to, and he heard only their voices in bitter argument, tears, reproaches, curses; but at last, as he paced to and fro in his lonely room, the tumult died down and he could wrestle with the new turbulent thoughts awakened in him.... Work was out of the question. He had been clawed back into life. If he did not want to be destroyed he must be profoundly, passionately, and scrupulously honest with himself. He must face his emotions as he had never done.
At first he thought of wildly heroic solutions. He would seize his opportunity with Kitty, take advantage of her soft gratitude and sweep her out of harm's way..... But what was the good of that? It settled nothing, solved nothing. To act without Clara's knowledge would be to betray her. That he was sure was what Verschoyle had done.
Already he had interfered and there was no knowing what Claude's spite might lead to.... O God, what a tangle! What should be done, what could be done, for Clara? No one mattered but she. Mann, Verschoyle, himself, what did any of them matter? She was the unique, irreplaceable personality. Of that he was sure. It was through her glorious innocence that all these strange things had happened to her. A less generous, a more experienced and calculating woman would have known instinctively that there was some queer story behind Charles Mann.... She could leap into a man's heart through his mind. That was where she was so dangerous to herself. The history of his purely physical emotions would concern her not at all. Her own emotions in their purity could recognise no separation between body and spirit, nor in others could they suspect any division.... Of that he was sure. Without that the whole embroglio was fantastic and incredible. She could never in so short a time have achieved what she had done through calculation and intrigue. That kind of success took years of patience under checks, rebuffs, and insults.... Everywhere she offered her superb youth, and it was taken and used, used for purposes which she could not even suspect. Her youth would be taken, she would be given no room, no time in which to develop her talent or her personality.
The way of the world? It had been the way of the world too long, but the strong of heart and the worthy of soul had always resisted or ignored it.
Sometimes Rodd thought the only thing to do was to wait, to leave the situation to develop naturally. It would do Mann no great harm to get into trouble, but then—Clara would be marked. All her life she would have to fight against misunderstanding.... No, no. There could be no misunderstanding where she was concerned. Her personality answered everything. It would be fine, it would be splendid, to see her overriding all obstacles in her bounteous gift of the treasure that was in her to a world that in its worship of self-help and material power had forgotten youth, courage, and the supreme power of joy.