"How could I suppose things said in a private conversation would ever appear in print? I only said that you had a studio because you composed and wanted quiet, and that I had been picking up a few old things to make it look homey. How extraordinary of Miss Gretch!"
"It has made me look very ridiculous. I am quite unknown, and therefore it is impossible for the public to be interested in me. Miss Gretch is certainly a very inefficient journalist. Elgar! Delius too! I wonder she didn't compare me with Scriabine while she was about it. How hateful it is being made a laughing-stock like this."
"Oh, nobody reads those papers, I expect. Still, Miss Gretch——"
"Gretch! What a name!" said Claude.
His anger vanished in an abrupt fit of laughter, but he started for the studio in half an hour looking decidedly grim. When he had gone Charmian picked up the torn cuttings which were lying on the carpet. She had been very slow in finishing breakfast that day.
Since her meeting with Jacob Crayford her mind had run perpetually on opera. She could not forget his words, spoken with the authority of the man who knew, "Opera's the only thing nowadays, the only really big proposition." She could not forget that he had left England to "put Europe through his sieve" for a composer who could stand up against Jacques Sennier. What a chance there was now for a new man. He was being actively searched for. If only Claude had written an opera! If only he would write an opera now!
Charmian never doubted her husband's ability to do something big. Her instinct told her that he had greatness of some kind in him. His music had deeply impressed her. But she was sure it was not the sort of thing to reach a wide public. It seemed to her against the trend of taste of the day. There was an almost terrible austerity in it, combined, she believed, with great power and originality. She longed to hear some of it given in public with the orchestra and voices. She had thought of trying to "get hold of" one of the big conductors, Harold Dane, or Vernon Randall, of trying to persuade him to give Claude a hearing at Queen's Hall. Then a certain keen prudence had held her back. A voice had whispered, "Be patient!" She realized the importance of the first step taken in public. Jacques Sennier had been utterly unknown in England. He appeared as the composer of the Paradis Terrestre. If he had been known already as the composer of a number of things which had left the public indifferent, would he have made the enormous success he had made? She remembered Mascagni and his Cavalleria, Leoncavallo and his Pagliacci. And she was almost glad that Claude was unknown. At any rate, he had never made a mistake. That was something to be thankful for. He must never make a mistake. But there would be no harm in arousing a certain interest in his personality, in his work. A man like Jacob Crayford kept a sharp look-out for fresh talent. He read all that appeared about new composers of course. Or someone read for him. Even "that dreadful Miss Gretch's" lucubrations might come under his notice.
For a week now Claude had gone every day after breakfast to the studio. Charmian had not yet disturbed him there. She felt that she must handle her husband gently. Although he was so kind, so disposed to be sympathetic, to meet people half way, she knew well that there was something in him to which as yet she had never probed, which she did not understand. She was sufficiently intelligent not to deceive herself about this, not to think that because Claude was a man of course she, a woman, could see all of him clearly. The hidden something in her husband might be a thing resistent. She believed she must go to work gently, subtly, even though she meant to be very firm. So she had let Claude have a week to himself. This gave him time to feel that the studio was a sanctum, perhaps also that it was a rather lonely one. Meanwhile, she had been searching for "words."
That task was a difficult one, because her mind was obsessed by the thought of opera. Oratorio had always been a hateful form of art to her. She had grown up thinking it old-fashioned, out-moded, absurdly "plum-puddingy," and British. In the realm of orchestral music she was more at home. She honestly loved orchestral music divorced from words. But the music of Claude's which she knew was joined with words. And he must do something with words. For that, as it were, would lead the way toward opera. Orchestral music was more remote from opera. If Claude set some wonderful poem, and a man like Jacob Crayford heard the setting, he might see a talent for opera in it. But he could scarcely see that in a violin concerto, a quartet for strings, or a symphony. So she argued. And she searched anxiously for words which might be set dramatically, descriptively. She dared not assail Claude yet with a libretto for opera. She felt sure he would say he had no talent for such work, that he was not drawn toward the theater. But if she could lead him gradually toward things essentially dramatic, she might wake up in him forces the tendency of which he had never suspected.
She re-read Rossetti, Keats, Shelley, dipped into William Morris,—Wordsworth no—into Fiona Macleod, William Watson, John Davidson, Alfred Noyes. Now and then she was strongly attracted by something, she thought, "Will it do?" And always at such moments a vision of Jacob Crayford seemed to rise up before her, with large brown eyes, ears like a faun, nervous hands, and the tiny beard. "Is it a business proposition?" The moving lips said that. And she gazed again at the poem which had arrested her attention, she thought, "Is it a business proposition?" Keats's terribly famous Belle Dame Sans Merci really attracted her more than anything else. She knew it had been set by Cyril Scott, and other ultra-modern composers, but she felt that Claude could do something wonderful with it. Yet perhaps it was too well known.