"The climate here carries one on marvellously," he exclaimed. "When I think that I wanted to go to bed just before you came, Alston!"
He threw out his hand with a laugh. Then, picking up a glass of champagne, he added:
"I say, let us make a bargain!"
"What is it, old chap?"
"Let us—just us three—have supper together after the first performance. I couldn't stand a supper-party with a lot of semi-strangers."
"I'll come! Drink to that night!"
They drank.
Cigars were lit and talk flooded the warm red room. Words rushed to the lips of them all. Charmian lay back on the sofa, with big cushions piled under her head, and Claude, sometimes walking about the room, told them the history of the night in the theater. They interrupted, put questions, made comments, protested, argued, encouraged, exclaimed.
Mr. Cane had brought pressman after pressman to interview Claude on the libretto scandal, as they called it. It seemed that Madame Sennier had made her libelous statement in a violent fit of temper, brought on by a bad rehearsal at the Metropolitan Opera House. Annie Meredith, who was to sing the big rôle in Sennier's new opera, and who was much greater as an actress than as a vocalist, had complained of the weakness of the libretto, and had attacked Madame Sennier for having made Jacques set it. Thereupon the great Henriette had lost all control of her powerful temperament. The secret bitterness engendered in her by her failure to capture the libretto of Gillier had found vent in the outburst which, no doubt with plenty of amplifications, had got into the evening papers. The management at first had wished to attempt the impossible, to try to muzzle the pressmen. But their publicity agent knew better. Madame Sennier had been carried by temper into stupidity. She had made a false move. The only thing to do now was to make a sensation of it.
As Claude told of the pressmen's questions his mind burned with excitement, and a recklessness, such as he had never felt before, invaded him. He had been indignant, had even felt a sort of shame, when he was asked whether he had been "cute" in the libretto matter, whether he had stolen a march on his rival. Crayford's treatment of the affair had disgusted him. For Crayford, with his sharp eye to business, had seen at once that their "game" was, of course with all delicacy, all subtlety, to accept the imputation of shrewdness. The innocent "stunt" was "no good to anyone" in his opinion. And he had not scrupled to say so to Claude. There had been an argument—the theater is the Temple of Argument—and Claude had heard himself called a "lobster," but had stuck to his determination to use truth as a weapon in his defense. But now, as he told all this, he felt that he did not care either way. What did it matter if dishonorable conduct, if every deadly sin, were imputed to him out here so long as he "made good" in the end with the work of his brain, the work which had led him to Africa and across the Atlantic? What did it matter if the work were a spurious thing, a pasticcio, a poor victim which had been pulled this way and that, changed, cut, added to? What did it matter if the locusts swarmed over it—so long as it was a success? The blatant thing—everyone, every circumstance, was urging Claude to snatch at it; and in this early hour of the winter morning, excited by the intensity of the strain he was undergoing, by the pull on his body, but far more by the pull on his soul, he came to a sudden and crude decision; at all costs the blatant thing should be his, the popular triumph, the success, if not of the high-bred merit, then of sheer spectacular sensation. There is an intimate success that seems to be of the soul, and there is another, reverberating, resounding, like the clashing of brass instruments beaten together. Claude seemed to hear them at this moment as he talked with ever-growing excitement.