CHAPTER VII
When they had been married three years she knew many hours of boredom. She could not disguise from herself that she found the life she led more and more unsatisfying—that luxury and a devoted husband, who was in court during the day, and often in his study half the night, were not all that she had craved for; that her environment was philistine, depressing, dull!
And she lectured herself and said the fault was her own, and that it was a very much better environment than her abilities entitled her to. She recited all the moral precepts that a third person might have uttered; and the dissatisfaction remained.
To write plays ceases to be an attractive occupation when they are never produced. She had written several plays by this time, and submitted them, more or less judiciously, to several West End theatres. There had even been an instance of a manager returning a manuscript in response to her fourth application for it. But she was no nearer to success, or to an artistic circle.
A career at the Bar is not all causes célèbres, and the details of Heriot's briefs were rarely enthralling to her mind, even when he discussed them with her; and when he came into the drawing-room he did not want to discuss his briefs. He wanted to talk trifles, just as he preferred to see a musical comedy or a farce when they went out. Nor did he press her for particulars of her own pursuits during his absence. She never sighed over him, and as she appeared to be cheerful, he thought she was contented. That such allusions to her literary work as she made were careless, he took to mean that she had gradually acquired staider views. Once he perceived that it was perhaps quieter for her than for most women, for she had no intimate acquaintances; but then she had never been used to any! There were her books, and her music, and her shopping—no, he did not think she could be bored. Besides, her manner at dinner was always direct evidence to the contrary!
She was now twenty-five years old, and the Kensington flat, and abundant means had lost their novelty. She was never moved by a clever novel without detesting her own obscurity; never looked at the window of the Stereoscopic Company without a passion of envy for the successful artists; never accompanied Heriot to the solemn houses without yearning for a passport to Upper Bohemia instead. She was twenty-five years old, and marriage, without having fulfilled the demands of her temperament, had developed her sensibilities. It was at this period that she met Lucas Field.
If her existence had been a story, nothing could have surprised her less than such a meeting. It would have been at this juncture precisely that she looked for the arrival of an artist, and Lucas Field would probably have been a brilliant young man who wore his hair long and wrote decadent verse. The trite in fiction is often very astonishing in one's own life, however, and, as a matter of fact, she found their introduction an event, and foresaw nothing at all.
Lucas Field was naturally well known to her by reputation—so well known that when the hostess brought "Mr. Field" across to her, Mamie never dreamed of identifying him with the dramatist. She had long since ceased to expect to meet anybody congenial at these parties, and the fish had been reached before she discovered who it really was who had taken her down.
Field was finding it a trifle dreary himself. He had not been bred in the vicinity of the footlights—-his father had been a physician, and his mother the daughter of a Lincolnshire parson—but he had drifted into dramatic literature when he came down from Oxford, and the atmosphere of the artistic world had become essential to him by now. Portman Square, though he admitted its desirability, and would have been mortified if it had been denied to him, invariably oppressed him a shade when he entered it. He was at the present time foretasting hell in the fruitless endeavour to devise a scenario for his next play, and he had looked at Mamie with a little interest as he was conducted across the drawing-room. A beautiful woman has always an air of suggestion; she is a beginning, a "heroine" without a plot. Regarded from the easel she is all-sufficing—contemplated from the desk, she is illusive. After you have admired the tendrils of hair at the nape of her neck, you realise with despondence that she takes you no farther than if she had been plain.
Field had realised that she left him in the lurch before his soup plate had been removed. Presently he inquired if she was fond of the theatre.
"Please don't say 'yes' from politeness," he added.
"Why should I?"
She had gathered the reason in the next moment, and her eyes lit with eagerness. He had a momentary terror that she was going to be commonplace.
"I couldn't dream that it was you—here!" she said apologetically.
"Isn't a poor playwright respectable?" he asked.
There was an instant in which she felt that on her answer depended the justification of her soul. She said afterwards that she could have "fallen round an epigram's neck."
"I should think the poor playwright must be very dull," she replied.
This was adequate, however, and better than his own response, which was of necessity conventional.
"I have seen your new comedy," she continued.
"I hope it pleased you?"
"I admired it immensely—like every one else. It is a great success, isn't it?"
"The theatre is very full every night," he said deprecatingly.
"Then it is a success!"
"Does that follow?"
"You are not satisfied with it—it falls short of what you meant? I shouldn't have supposed that; it seemed to me entirely clear!"
"That I had a theory? Really? Perhaps I have not failed so badly as I thought." He did not think he had failed at all, but this sort of thing was his innocent weakness.
"Miss Millington is almost perfect as 'Daisy,' isn't she?"
"'Almost'? Where do you find her weak?"
She blushed.
"She struck me—of course I am no authority—as not quite fulfilling your idea in the first act—when she accepted the Captain. I thought perhaps she was too responsible there—too grown up."
"There isn't a woman in London who could play 'Daisy,'" said Field savagely. "In other words, you think she wrecked the piece?"
"Oh no, indeed!"
"If 'Daisy' isn't a child when she marries, the play has no meaning, no sense. That is why the character was so difficult to cast—in the first act she must be a school-girl, and in the others an emotional woman."
"Perhaps I said too much."
"You are a critic, Mrs. Heriot."
"Oh, merely——"
"Merely?"
"Merely very interested in the stage."
"To be interested in the stage is very ordinary; to be a judge of it is rather rare. No, you didn't say too much: Miss Millington doesn't fulfil my idea when she accepts 'Captain Arminger.' And to be frank, I haven't fulfilled Miss Millington's idea of a consistent part."
"I can understand," said Mamie, "that the great drawback to writing for the stage is that one depends so largely on one's interpreters. A novelist succeeds or fails by himself, but a dramatist——"
"A dramatist is the most miserable of created beings," said Field, "if he happens to be an artist."
"I can hardly credit that. I can't credit anybody being miserable who is an artist." (He laughed. It was not polite, but he couldn't help it.) "Though I can understand his having moods of the most frightful depression!" she added.
"Oh, you can understand that?"
"Quite. Would he be an artist if he didn't have them!"
"May I ask if you write yourself?"
"N—no," she murmured.
"Does that mean 'yes'?"
"It means 'only for my own amusement.'"
"The writer who only writes for his own amusement is mythical, I'm afraid," said Field. "One often hears of him, but he doesn't bear investigation. You don't write plays?"
"No—I try to!"
He regarded her a little cynically.
"I thought ladies generally wrote novels?"
"I wish to be original, you see."
"Do you send them anywhere?"
"Oh, yes; I send them; I suppose I always shall!"
"You're really in earnest then? You're not discouraged?"
"I'm earnest, and discouraged, too.... Is it impertinent to ask if you had experiences like mine when you were younger?"
"I wrote plays for ten years before I ever passed through a stage-door—one must expect to work for years before one is produced.... Of course, one may work all one's life, and not be produced then!"
"It depends how clever one is, or whether one is clever at all?"
"It depends on a good many things. It depends sometimes on advice."
If she had been less lovely, he would not have said this, and he knew it; if she had not been Mrs. Heriot, he would not have said it either. The average woman who "wants a literary man's advice" is the bane of his existence, and Field was, not only without sympathy for the tyro as a rule—he was inclined to disparage the majority of his colleagues. He was clever, and was aware of it; he occupied a prominent position. He had arrived at the point when he could dare to be psychological. "It depends sometimes on advice," he said. And the wife of George Heriot, Q.C., murmured: "Unfortunately, I have nobody to advise me!"
Even as it was, he regretted it when he took his leave; and the manuscript that he had offered to read lay in his study for three weeks before he opened it. He picked it up one night, remembering that the writer had been very beautiful. The reading inspired him with a desire to see her again. That the play was full of faults goes without saying, but it was unconventional, and there was character in it. He recollected that she had interested him while they talked after dinner on a couch by the piano; and, as her work was promising, he wrote, volunteering to point out in an interview, if she liked, those errors in technique which it would take too long to explain by letter. It cannot be made too clear that if she had sent him a work of genius and had been plain Miss Smith in a home-made blouse, he would have done nothing of the sort. He called upon her with no idea that his hints would make a dramatist of her, nor did he care in the slightest degree whether they did, or did not. She was a singularly lovely woman, and as her drama had not been stupid—stupidity would have repelled him—he thought a tête-à-tête with her would be agreeable.
To Mamie, however, the afternoon when he sat sipping tea in her drawing-room, like an ordinary mortal, was the day of her life. She told him that she had once hoped to be an actress, and believed that the avowal would advance her in his esteem. He answered that he should not be astonished if she had the histrionic gift; and was secretly disenchanted a shade by what he felt to be banal. Then they discussed his own work, and he found her appreciation remarkably intelligent. To talk about himself to a woman, who listened with exquisite eyes fixed upon his face, was very gratifying to him. Field had rarely spent a pleasanter hour. It is not intimated that he was a vain puppy—he was not a puppy at all. He had half unconsciously felt the want of a sympathetic confidant for a long while, though, and albeit he did not instantaneously realise that Mrs. Heriot supplied the void, he walked back to his chambers with exhilaration.
He realised it by degrees. He had never married. He had avoided matrimony till he was thirty because he could not afford it; and during the last decade he had escaped it because he had not met a woman whom he desired sufficiently to pay such a price. When he had seen Mamie several times—and in the circumstances it was not difficult to invent reasons for seeing her—he wondered whether he would have proposed to her if she had been single.
Heriot was very pleased to have him dine with them; and he was not ignorant that during the next few months Field often dropped in about five o'clock. Mamie concealed nothing—knowingly—and the subject of her writing was revived now. She told George that Mr. Field thought she had ability. She repeated his criticisms; frankly admired his talent; confessed that she was proud to have him on her visiting list—and fell in love with him without either analysing her feelings, or perceiving her risk.
And while Mrs. Heriot fell in love with him, Lucas Field was not blind. He saw a great deal more than she saw herself—he saw, not only the influence he exercised over her, but that she had moped before he appeared. He did not misread her; he was conscious that she would never take a lover from caprice—that she was the last woman in the world to sin lightly, or under the rose. He saw that, if he yielded to the temptation that had begun to assail him, he must be prepared to ask her to live with him openly. But he asked himself whether it was impossible that he could prevail on her to do that, had he the mind to do so—whether she was so impregnable as she believed.
He was by this time fascinated by her. His happiest afternoons were spent in South Kensington, advancing his theories, and talking of his latest scenes; nor was it a lie when he averred that she assisted him. To be an artist it is not necessary to be able to produce, and if her own attempts had been infinitely more futile than they were, she might still have expressed opinions that were of service to another. Many of her views were impracticable, naturally. Psychological as his tendencies were, he was a dramatist, and he could not snap his fingers at the laws imposed by the footlights, though he might affect to deride them in his confidences. The only dramatist alive was Ibsen, he said; yet he did not model himself on Ibsen, albeit he was delighted when she exclaimed, "How Ibsenish that is!" Many of her views were impracticable, because she was ignorant about the stage; but many were intensely stimulating. The more he was with her, the less he doubted her worthiness of sinning for his sake. He was so different from the ordinary dramatic author! On the ordinary dramatic author, with no ideas beyond "curtains" and "fees," she would have been thrown away. He did not wish to be associated with a scandal—it would certainly be unpleasant—but she dominated him, there was no disguising the fact. And he would be very good to her; he would marry her. She was adorable!
His meditations had not progressed so far without the girl's eyes being opened to her weakness; and now she hated herself more bitterly than she had hated the tedium of her life. She knew that she loved him. She was wretched when he was not with her, and ashamed when he was there. She wandered about the flat in her solitude, frightened as she realised what an awful thing had come to her. But she was drunk—intoxicated by the force of the guilty love, and by the thought that such a man as Lucas Field could be in love with her. She revered him for not having told her of the feelings that she inspired. Her courage was sustained by the belief that he did not divine her own—that she would succeed in stamping them out without his dreaming of the danger she had run. Yet she was "drunk"; and one afternoon the climax was reached—he implored her to go away with him.