MUMMERY

A TALE OF THREE IDEALISTS

BY

GILBERT CANNAN

LONDON: 48 PALL MALL
W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.
GLASGOW — MELBOURNE — AUCKLAND

Copyright 1918

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

NOVELS

PETER HOMUNCULUS
LITTLE BROTHER
ROUND THE CORNER
OLD MOLE
YOUNG EARNEST
THREE PRETTY MEN
MENDEL
THE STUCCO HOUSE
PINK ROSES
FOUR PLAYS
EVERYBODY'S HUSBAND
WINDMILLS
SATIRE
THE JOY OF THE THEATRE
FREEDOM
THE ANATOMY OF SOCIETY
NOEL
POEMS

TO ARIEL
AMY GWEN WILSON

Shakespeare dreamed you, Ariel,
In a poet's ecstasy.
I have loved and dare not tell
Of your being's mystery.

Ariel, from Shakespeare's dream
Flown into my love on earth,
You shall help me to redeem
Love and truth denied their birth.

In a world by Caliban
Brutalised and done to death,
We will weave a spell that Man
May in freedom draw his breath.

CONTENTS

I

A DESCENT ON LONDON

On a day in August, in one of those swiftly-moving years which hurried Europe towards the catastrophe awaiting it, there arrived in London a couple of unusual appearance, striking, charming, and amusing. The man was tall, big, and queerly compounded of sensitive beauty and stodgy awkwardness. He entered London with an air of hostility; sniffed distastefully the smells of the station, peered in distress through the murky light, and clearly by his personality and his exploitation of it in his dress challenged the uniformity of the great city which was his home. His dress was peculiar: an enormous black hat above a shock of wispy fair hair, an ill-cut black coat, a cloak flung back over his shoulders, a very high starched collar, abominable trousers, and long, pointed French boots.

'But they have rebuilt the station!' he said, in a loud voice of almost peevish disapproval.

'I remember reading about it, Carlo,' replied his companion. 'It fell down and destroyed a theatre.'

'A bad omen,' said Charles Mann, 'I wish we had arrived at another station.'

'I don't think it matters,' smiled Clara Day.

'I say it does,' snapped he. 'It is a mean little station. A London station should be grand and spacious, the magnificent ante-room to a royal city. I must get them to let me design a station.'

'They don't often fall down,' said Clara. 'I wish you would see to the luggage.'

All the other passengers, French and English, had collected their baggage and had hurried away, but Charles Mann was never in a hurry, and he stayed scowling at the station which London had had the effrontery to erect in his absence.

'In Germany and Russia,' he muttered, 'they understand that stations are very important.'

'Do look after the luggage,' urged Clara, and very reluctantly Charles Mann strolled along the platform, leaving his companion to the admiration of the passengers arriving for the next out-going train. She deserved it, for she was extremely handsome, almost pathetically young for the knowledge written in her eyes and on her lips, and the charming dress of purple and old red designed for her slim figure by Charles drew the curious and rather scandalised eyes of the women. It was in no fashion, but the perfection of its individuality raised it above that tyranny, just as Clara's personality, in its compact force, and delicious free movement, raised her above the conventionalism which makes woman mere reflections of each other. When she moved, her clothes were liquid with her vitality. When she stood still, they were as monumental as herself. She and they were one.

She was happy. It had taken her nearly two years to bring Charles back to London, where, as an Englishman, and, as she knew, one of the most gifted Englishmen of his time, his work lay, and she felt certain that here, in London, among other artists, it would be possible to extricate him from his own thoughts, which abroad kept him blissfully happy but prevented his doing work which was intelligible to any one else.

He was rather a long time over the luggage, and at last she ran along the platform to find him lost in contemplation.

'Have you decided where we are going to?' she asked.

'Eh?'

'Have you decided where we are going to?'

'I must get a secretary,' he replied, and Clara laughed. 'But I must,' he went on. 'It is absolutely necessary for me to have a secretary. I can do nothing without one.... He shall be a good man, and he shall be paid four hundred a year.'

Clara approached a porter and told him to take their luggage to the hotel.

'We can stay there while we look about us,' she said. She had learned that when Charles talked about money it was best to ignore him. She took cheap rooms at the top of the hotel, with a view out over the river to the Surrey hills, and there until three o'clock in the morning Charles smoked cigars and talked, as only he could talk, of art and Italy and Paris—which they had left without paying their rent—and the delights and abominations of London.

'I feel satisfied now that you were right,' he said. 'Here we are in London and I shall begin to do my real work. I shall have a secretary and an advertising agent, and I shall talk to London in the language it understands.... Paris knows me, Munich knows me, St Petersburg knows me; London shall know me. There are artists in London. All they want is a lead.'

Clara went to bed and lay for a long time with erratic memories streaming through her brain—days in the hills in Italy, nights of hunger in Paris, the cross-eyed man who stared so hard at her on the boat, the dismal port at Calais, the more dismal landing at Dover, the detached existence of her three years with Charles, whose astonishing vitality kindled and continually disappointed her hope.... And then queer, ugly memories of her own wandering, homeless childhood with her grandfather, who had died in Paris, leaving her the little money he had, so that she had stayed among the artists in Paris, had been numbed and dazed by them, until Charles took possession of her exactly as he did of stray cats and dogs and birds in cages.

'This is London,' she said, 'and I am twenty-one.' So she, too, approached London in a spirit of challenging hostility, determined if, as she believed, there was nothing a woman could not do, that London should acknowledge Charles as the genius of which he so constantly remarked it stood in need.

In the morning she was up betimes, and stood at the window looking out over the sprawl of the south side of the river to the dome of Bedlam and the tower of Southwark Cathedral, the clustered chimneys, and the gray litter of untidy, huddled roofs.

'That is not London,' said Charles from the bed, as she cried ecstatically. 'London is a very small circle, the centre of which is to the cultivated the National Gallery, and to the vulgar Piccadilly Circus.... Piccadilly Circus we can ignore. What we have to do is to stand on the dome of the National Gallery and sing our gospel. Then if we can make the cultured hear us, we shall have the vulgar gaping and opening their pockets.'

'I don't want you to be applauded by people who can't appreciate you,' said Clara.

'No?' grumbled Charles. 'Well, I'm going to have bath and breakfast and then I shall astonish you.'

'You always do that,' cried Clara. 'Darling Charles!'

She rang the bell, and sat on the bed, and in a few minutes they were enjoying their continental breakfast of coffee, rolls, and honey.

'I sometimes feel,' said Charles, 'that I have merely taken the place of your grandfather.... You are the only creature I have ever met who is younger than myself. That is why you can do as you like with me.... But you can't make me grow a beard.'

'I wish you would.'

'And then I should be like your grandfather?'

'No. You would be more like you.'

'You adorable child,' he said. 'You would reform me out of existence if you had your way.'

Charles got up, had his bath, shaved, and went out, leaving Clara to unpack and make out a list of clothes that he required before she could consider him fit to go out into that London whose centre is the National Gallery.

As he did not return for lunch, she set out alone to explore the region which he designed to conquer. She wandered in a dream of delight, first of all through the galleries and then through the streets, as far as Westminster on the one side, and as Oxford Street on the other, and fixed in her mind the location of every one of the theatres. She was especially interested in the women, and was both hurt and pleased by the dislike and suspicion with which they regarded her originality.... Every now and then she saw a face which made her want to go up to its owner and say: 'I'm Clara Day; I've just come to London,' but she forebore; and when people smiled at her, as many did, she returned their smile, and hurried on in her eagerness to explore and to understand the kingdom which was to be Charles Mann's—a kingdom, like others, of splendour and misery, but overwhelmingly rich with its huge hotels, great blocks of offices, vast theatres and music-halls, enormous shops full of merchandise of the finest quality; jewels, clothes, furs, napery, silver, cutlery; its monuments, its dense traffic; its flower-sellers and innumerable newsvendors; its glimpses through the high-walled streets of green trees, its dominating towers; its lounging men and women. Jews, with gold chains and diamond rings, Americans with large cigars and padded shoulders, painted women, niggers, policemen, match-sellers, boot-blacks; its huge coloured advertisements; its sudden holes, leading to regions underground; its sluggish, rich self-satisfaction.... It overawed Clara a little, and as she sped along she whispered to herself, 'This is me in London.'

On her way back to the hotel she bought a paper, and, on opening it, found that it contained an interview with Mr Charles Mann on his return to London, an announcement that a dinner was to be given in his honour, and that he intended to hold an exhibition; and then Charles's views on many subjects were set out at some length, and he had thrown out a suggestion that a committee of artists should be formed to supervise the regeneration of London and to defeat the Americanisation which threatened it.

Clara hurried back to the hotel and found Charles in a great state of excitement, talking to a thin, weedy little man whom he introduced as Mr Clott—his secretary.

'It has begun, child,' said Charles. 'Have you seen the papers? Things move quickly nowadays.... This evening I shall be very busy.'

'But you mustn't do anything without me,' Clara protested. 'You promised you wouldn't. You are sure to make a mess of it.'

'Clott,' said Charles magnificently, 'please send a copy of the letter I have dictated to the Press Association.'

'At once,' replied Mr Clott, with the alacrity of a man in a new job, and he darted from the room.

'He's a fool,' said Clara angrily, 'a perfect fool.'

'Of course he is,' answered Charles, 'or he would not be a secretary. He has undertaken that by the end of this week we shall be in a comfortable furnished house.'

'But who is to pay for it?'

'There is plenty of money in the world,' said Charles, who was so pleased with himself that Clara had not the heart to pursue the argument any further. 'London,' he continued, 'is a great talking shop. At present they haven't anything much to discuss so they shall talk about me.'

For a moment Clara felt that he had become as external to her as the people in the streets of the kingdom he designed to conquer, but she recollected that whenever he was at work he always was abstracted from her and entirely absorbed in what he was doing, only, however, to return like a giant refreshed to enter into her world again and make it more delightful than before. He was absorbed now, and she thought with a queer pang of alarm of the women with their dull, suspicious eyes, and, without realising the connection between what she thought and what she said, she broke into his absorption with,—

'Carlo, dear, I shall have to marry you.'

He spun round as though he had been stung and asked,—

'Good God, why?'

And again her answer was strange and came from some remote recess of her being,—

'London is different.'

Now Charles Mann was one of those sensitive people who yield at once to the will of another when it is precise and purposeful; and when in this girl, whom he had collected as he collected drunkards, cats, dogs, and other helpless creatures, such a will moved, though it cut like hot iron through his soul, he obeyed it without argument. He, whose faith in himself was scattered and dissipated, had in her a faith as whole as that of a child who accepts without a murmur a whipping from his father.

'My dear girl——' he murmured.

'You know you will have to,' she said firmly.

He looked uncomfortable. His large face was suddenly ashen and yellow, and a certain weakness crept into his ordinarily firm lips and nostrils. The girl's eyes were blazing at him, searching him, making him feel transparent, and so uncomfortable that he could do nothing but obey to relieve his own acute distress.

'Yes, of course.'

'Don't you want to?'

'Yes, of course.'

'It doesn't make any difference to us inside ourselves.'

'No. Of course not.'

What he wanted to say was, 'You're pinning me down. I'm not used to being pinned down. No one has ever pinned me down before.'

But he could not say it. He could only agree that it would be a good thing if they married, because London was different.

'At once?' he asked.

'At once,' said she.

He rang the bell, asked for Mr Clott, and when that gentleman appeared, ordered him to procure a special licence without delay. Mr Clott made a note of it in his little red book, tucked his pencil behind his ear, and trotted away, his narrow little back stiffened by elation. He, a gentleman of the Automobile Club, for whom there was no life outside the narrow circle whose centre is Piccadilly Circus, had been uneasy in his mind about the young lady, who was so clearly neither married nor purchasable, and it was a relief to him that she was to be his new employer's wife, though he was afraid of her, and shrivelled to the marrow in her presence.

II

THE DWELLERS IN ENCHANTMENT

'Ça marche,' said Charles Mann to his wife a few weeks later.

His programme was maturing. He had arranged for two books to be published, for an exhibition to be held, for a committee to be formed, for lectures to be delivered in provincial centres, and he had been insulted by an offer to play a part in a forthcoming production of King Lear at the Imperium Theatre. He had forgotten that he had ever been an actor and did not wish to be reminded of it, and he was incensed when the manager of the Imperium used the offer as an advertising paragraph.

'The fellow is jealous of the attention I am receiving in the Press and wants to divert some of it to himself.'

'You should go and see him,' suggested Clara.

'It is his place to come and see me.'

'No. Go and see him.'

'Are you right?'

'I always am.'

'Clott, take down this letter to Sir Henry Butcher, Imperium Theatre, S.W.... "Dear Sir Henry, When I declined your kind offer the other day, my refusal was as private as your suggestion. I can only conclude that some mistake has been made and I should like to have an understanding with you before I write a letter of explanation to the Press....'"

'You think too much of the Press, Carlo.'

'Only now, darling.... Later on the Press will have to come to me.'

Clara looked dubious.

'You're moving too quickly,' she said. 'I'm getting more used to London now, and I'm afraid of it. It is just a great big machine, and there's no control over it. There are times when I want to take you away from it.'

'You gave me no peace until we came here.'

'Yes. But I didn't want to begin at the top. I wanted to come over and live as we lived in Paris.'

'Impossible. What is freedom in Paris is poverty in London.'

'But all your time goes in writing to the papers and sitting on committees. You aren't doing any work.'

'I've worked in exile for ten years. I can carry on with that for a year at least.'

'Very well. Only don't stop believing in yourself.'

'I could never do that.'

'I think it would be very easy for you to begin believing in what the papers said about you.'

'You're too young, my dear. You see things too clearly.'

They were now in the furnished house found for them by Mr Clott, a most respectable house in an unimpeachable neighbourhood: an old house reclaimed from the slums, re-faced, re-panelled, painted, papered, decorated by a firm who supplied taste as well as furniture. Charles hated it, but Clara, who through her grandfather knew and appreciated comfort, was delighted with it, and with a few deft touches in every room made it her own. It hurt her that Charles should hate it because it was good and decent in its atmosphere, and belonged to the widow of a famous man of letters, who, intrigued by the remarkable couple, had called once or twice and had invited Clara to her house, where the foreign-bred girl for the first time encountered the muffins and tea element of London life, which is its best and most characteristic. It seemed to her that, if Charles would not accept that, he would never be reconciled to his native country as she wanted him to be. There was about the muffins and tea in a cosy drawing-room a serenity which had always been to her the distinguishing mark of Englishmen abroad. It had been in her grandfather's character, and she wanted it to be in Charles's. It was to a certain extent in his character through his art, but she wanted it also to be through more tangible things. As she wanted it, she willed it, and her will was an impersonal thing which in its movement dragged her whole being with it, and it had no more consideration for others than it had for herself. She could see no reason why an artist should not be in touch with what was best in the ordinary lives of ordinary people; indeed, she could not imagine from what other source he could draw sustenance....

Friends and acquaintances had come quickly. Success was so rapid as to be almost ridiculous, and hardly worth having, and people took everything that Charles said in a most maddeningly literal way. She understood what he meant, but very often she found that his utterances were translated into terms of money or politics or the commercial theatre, where they became just nonsense. He was being transformed from her Charles into a monstrous London Charles, a great artist whose greatness was of more importance than his art.

She first took alarm at this on the occasion of the dinner which the dear, delightful fellow arranged to have given to himself and then with childlike innocence accepted as a thing done in his honour—the first clear sign of the split in his personality which was to have such fatal consequences, for her and for so many others.

There were three hundred guests. The chair was taken by Professor Laverock, as a distinguished representative of modern painting, and he declared Mann to be the equal of Blake in vision, of Forain in technique, of Shelley in clear idealism. Representatives of the intellectual theatre of the time were present and spoke, but the theatre of success was unrepresented. There were critics, literary men, journalists of both sexes, idealists of both sexes, arrivists, careerists, everybody who had ever pleaded publicly for the theatre as a vehicle of art. Professor Laverock declared it to be Mann's mission to open the theatre to the musician, the poet, and the painter, and, if he might express his secret hope, to close it to the actor. There were many speeches, but Clara sat through them all staring straight in front of her, wondering if a single person in the room really understood what Charles wanted and what he meant. Whether they did so or not, Charles did not help them much, for in response to the toast of his health he rose, beamed boyishly at the company and said, 'I'm so happy to be back. Thank you very much. The theatre needs love. I give you my love.'

He sat down so suddenly that Clara gasped, and was frightened for a second or two by the idea that he had been taken ill. But when she turned to where he sat, he was chatting gaily to his neighbour and seemed to be unaware of any omission. She heard a man near her say, 'I did hope he was going to be indiscreet,' and she felt with acute disappointment that this was just a dinner, just an entertainment among many dinners and entertainments, and she was ashamed.

Charles, however, was delighted. 'Such nice people,' he said, as they walked home, 'such delightful people, and what a good dinner!'

'Get away. I hate you. You're horrible,' cried Clara, flinging from him.

'Now what's the matter?' he asked, utterly taken aback.

'You're so easily pleased,' she answered. 'People have only to be nice to you and you think the whole world is Heaven.'

'So it is with you, chicken.'

'Oh! Don't be so pleased! Don't be so pleased! Do lose your temper with me sometimes! I'm not a child.'

'But they were nice people.'

'They weren't. They were dreadful people. They were only there because they think you may succeed, and then there will be jobs for them all.'

'You see through people so much that you forget they are people at all.'

'That comes from living with you. I have to see through you to realise that you are a person....'

'Oh! I am a person then?'

'Only to me.... You reflect everybody else.'

'They are not worth more.'

'They are. Everybody is. If only you would be yourself to them, they would be themselves.'

'Oh!'

She had stung him, as she so often did, into self-realisation and self-criticism, a process so painful that, left to himself, he avoided it altogether.... He walked along moodily. They were crossing St James's Park. On the bridge he stopped, looked down into the water and said gloomily.

'I sometimes think that my soul is as placid and still and shallow as that water, and that you, like all the rest, have only seen your own reflection in me.... That's why I like the comfort of restlessness and change. Anything to break the stillness.'

'You couldn't say that if it were true,' she said.

'No. I suppose not,' and, with one of his astonishing changes of mood, he took her arm and began to talk of the day when he had first met her in Picquart's studio, where everybody was gay and lively except they two, so that he talked to her, and seemed to have been talking for ever and had no idea of ever ceasing to do so. And then he told her how better than even talking to her was being silent with her, and how all kinds of ideas in him that had been too shy to appear in solitude or with others had come tumbling out like notes of music because of her.

'I've nearly forgotten,' he said, 'what being in love is like. This was at the farthest end of love from that, something entirely new, so new as to be altogether outside life. I have had to grope back into it again.'

'I liked you,' said she, 'because you were English.'

'Did you?' He was puzzled. 'I thought that was precisely what I am not.'

Neither could be angry for very long, and neither could be rancorous. The enchantment in which they lived would sometimes disappear for a space, when they would suffer, and he would tell himself that he was too old for the girl, or that he was not the kind of man who could live with a woman, or that she was seducing him from his work, while she would just sit numbed until the enchantment came again. Without it there were moments when he seemed just ridiculous with his masses of papers, and Mr Clott, and his fussy insistence on being a great artist.... It was a keen pleasure to her to bring him back suddenly to physical things like food and clothes and to care for him. Sometimes he would forget everything except food and clothes, and then she lived in a horror lest he should remain so and lose altogether the power of abstraction and concentration which made him so singular and forceful, and so near the man she most deeply knew him to be if only some power, some event, even some accident, could make him realise it and force him out of his imprisonment and almost entombment in his own thoughts.

Her will concentrated on him anew and she said to herself, 'I can do it. I can do it. I know I can, and I will.' And when she was in these fierce passions she used to remember her grandfather, the kindly old bibliophile, looking anxiously at her and saying,—

'My dear, when you want a thing just look round and see if there aren't one or two other things you want.'

But she had never understood what he meant, and she had never been able to look round, for always there was one thing she wanted, and when she wanted it she could not help herself, but had to sacrifice everything, friends, possessions, even love. And as time went on, she realised that it was not Charles she wanted so much as some submerged quality in him. The object of her desire being simplified, her will set, only the more firmly, even rigidly.

It made her analyse him ruthlessly; his childish lack of self-criticism, his placidity, his insatiable vanity, his almost deliberate exploitation of his personal charm, all these things she cast aside and ignored. She came then to his thoughts, and here she was baffled because she knew so little of his history. Beyond his thoughts lay that in which she was passionately interested, but between her and it danced innumerable Charleses all inviting her attention, all bidding her look away from that one Charles Mann for whom she hungered with something of the worship which religious women have for their Saviour.

He was immensely kind to her, almost oppressively kind. He could never be otherwise to any living creature—in personal contact, but without that he was careless, indifferent, forgetful, although when she saw him again it was as though he had never been away. They were considered a charming and most devoted couple, and their domestic felicity helped him in his success.

Much talk in the newspapers, many committees—but Clara felt that merely another Charles was being created to dance between her and her desire. This was too far from what she wanted, and she could not see how it could lead to it; there was altogether too much talk. What he said was very fine but it merely gathered a rather flabby set of people round him—and most exasperatingly he liked it and them... 'Such nice people.'

'That is all very well,' said Clara, 'but we are spending far more than there is any possibility of your making.'

'There are rich men interested,' said Charles.

'But until you make money, they won't give you any.'

Hard sense was always too much for him, and he retired puzzled and rather pained from the argument.

Because she was beautiful she attracted many men, many flatterers, but as they penetrated her graciousness, they came upon the hard granite of her will and were baffled, unpleasantly disturbed, and used to leave her, darting angry glances at the blissful Charles, who was sublimely unconscious of criticism in those whom he approached. He accepted them as they were or seemed to be and expected the like from them. He was too busy, too eager, to question or to look for hidden motives in those who supported him, and that he was concealing anything or had anything to conceal never crossed his mind! He had other things to think of, always new things, new plans, new schemes, and he was fundamentally not interested in himself. A charming face, a lovely cloud in the sky, the scent of a flower, a glass of good wine could give him such delight as made him beam upon the world and find all things good. It was always a trifle which sent him soaring like a singing lark, always a trifle that could lift him from the depths of depression. Great emotion he did not seem to need, though the concentrated emotion with which he hurled himself at his work was tremendous. Happy is the people that has no history. For all that he was aware of, Charles had no history. He was born again every morning, and he could not realise that the world went grinding on from day to day....

Never had life been so sweet, never had he been so successful, never had he had so much money, never had he been so exquisitely cared for, never had so many doors been open to him, never had such pleasant things been said of him! He went to bed singing, and singing he awoke in the morning, but in her heart Clara was anxious and suspicious of London, most suspicious of the artists and literary men who thronged the house, and gathered at the elaborate supper which Charles insisted on giving every Sunday night. They were too denunciatory, too much aloof, too proud of their aloofness, and talked too much. She thought Charles too good for them and said so.

'Art is a brotherhood,' he said magnificently, 'and the meanest of the brethren is my equal.'

'That is no reason why you should be familiar with them. You cheapen yourself. Besides it is a waste of time.... A lot of people never do anything, and—I don't like it.'

'Ho! ho! Are you in revolt, chicken?'

'I don't want you to fritter away what you have got. It isn't worth while to spend money on people who can do nothing for you.'

'I don't want anybody to do anything for me. It is for art.'

'But they don't understand that. They think all sorts of wonderful things are going to happen through you.'

'So they are.... Hasn't it been wonderful so far?'

'For us. Yes.'

'Wasn't the exhibition a great success?'

'Yes.'

'Very well then.'

'But you only sold the work you have done during the last ten years. It is the work you are doing now that matters. What work are you doing?'

'Plenty—plenty. Mr Clott sends out not less than forty letters a day. And I have just invented some beautiful designs for Volpone.'

'Is it going to be done?'

'It will be when they see my designs.'

Clara bit her lip. This was precisely what she had hoped to scotch by coming to London. In Paris he had made marvellous designs. Artists had come to look at them and then they had been put away in a portfolio.

'What I want,' said he, 'is a patron, some one who, having made his money in soap, or pills, or margarine, wishes to make reparation through art.... Michael Angelo had a patron and I ought to have one, so that I can do for my theatre what he did for the Sistine Chapel.'

They didn't build the Sistine Chapel for him.'

'No.... N—o,' he mumbled.

'Don't you see that things are different now, Charles. Everything has to pay nowadays, and there aren't great public works for artists to do. Michael Angelo was an engineer as well.... You couldn't design a theatre without an architect now, could you?'

'Why should I when there are architects to do it?' He was beginning to get angry.

'If you could you would be able to carry out your own theories as well.... People want something more than drawings on paper....'

'You talk as though I had done nothing.'

'It has been too easy.... Appreciation is so easy for the kind of people who come here. It costs nothing, and they get a good deal in return.'

'Don't you worry about me, chick. I'm a great deal more practical than you suppose.'

'I only want to know,' she said, rising to leave the room, 'because, if you are not going to work, I must.'

'My dearest child,' he shouted, 'don't be so impatient. It is only a question of time. My book is not out yet. We are arranging for the reviews now. When that is done then the ball will really be set rolling.'

'To be quite frank with you,' retorted Clara. 'I hate it all being on paper. I am going to learn acting, and I'm going on the stage to find out what the theatre is like.... I don't see how else I can help you, and if I can't help you I must leave you.'

He protested loudly against that, so loudly and so vehemently that she pounced and, with her eyes blazing, told him that she intended to make her own career, and that whether it fitted in with his depended entirely upon himself.

'I won't have you wasted,' she cried, 'I won't. It has been going on too long, this writing down on paper, and drawing designs on paper, and now with all these columns about you in the papers you look like being smothered in paper. You might as well be a politician or an adventurer—You have no passion.'

'I! No passion!'

'On paper. The world's choked with paper, and London is stifled with it. My grandfather told me that. He spent his life travelling and reading old books—running away from it. I'm not going to run away from it, and I am not going to let you be smothered by it——'

'How long has this been simmering up in you?'

'Ever since that first day when you were interviewed.... We're not living our own lives at all, but the lives dictated to us by this ridiculous machinery that turns out papers ten times a day. We're——'

'Very well,' said Charles submissively. 'What do you want me to do?'

'I want you to keep your appointment with Sir Henry Butcher.'

He pulled a long face.

'You'll hate it, I know,' she added, 'but there is the theatre, and you've got to make the best of it. I dare say Michael Angelo didn't care particularly for the Sistine Chapel.'

III

IMPERIUM

Sir Henry Butcher sat in his sanctum, pulling his aggressive, bulbous nose, and ruefully turning over the account presented by his manager of the last week's business with his new production, a spectacular version of Ivanhoe, in which he appeared as Isaac of York.

'No pull,' he muttered. 'No pull.' And to console himself he took up a little pink packet of Press cuttings, and perused them.... 'Wonderful notices! Wonderful notices! It's these confounded music-halls and cinemas, lowering the people's taste. Yet the public's loyal, wonderfully loyal. Must be the play. Wish I'd read the book before I let old Kinslake have his three hundred. Told me everybody had read it....'

Sir Henry was a man of sixty, well-preserved, with the soft, infantine quality which grease paint imparts to the skin. He had an enormous head, large dark eyes, sly and humorous, in which, as his shallow whimsical thoughts flitted through his brain, mischief glinted. He was surrounded with portraits of himself in his various successes, and above his head was a bust of himself in the character of Napoleon. Every now and then, when he remembered it, he compressed his lips, and tucked his chin into his breast, but he could not deceive even himself, much less anybody else, and his habitual expression was that of a bland baby miraculously endowed with a knowledge of the world's mischief.

His room was luxurious but dark, being lit only by a skylight. The walls were lined with a dull gold lincrusta, and on them were hung portraits of the proprietor of the Imperium and a series of drawings for the famous Imperium posters, which had through many years brightened the gloomy streets of London and its ever expanding outskirts. Sir Henry's mischievous eyes flitted from drawing to drawing, and his tongue passed over his thick lips as he tasted again the savour of his success—more than twenty unbroken years of it. He thought of the crowded houses, the brilliant audiences he had gathered together, the happy speeches he had made, the banquets he had held after so many first performances—and then he thought of Ivanhoe, a mistake. Worse than a mistake, a strategical blunder, for now had come the time when his crowning ambition should be fulfilled, to have the Imperium unofficially acknowledged as the national theatre, so that when he retired it should be purchased for the nation and make his achievement immortal.... Macready, Irving, all of the great line had perished and were but names, while Henry Butcher would be remembered as the creator of the theatre, the people's theatre, the nation's theatre.... Then he remembered a particularly delicious wine he had drunk in this very room at supper, after rehearsal with the brilliant woman who had steered him through his early career and had saved him again and again from disaster—Teresa Chesney. Ah! there was no one like her now, no one. Actresses were ladies now, they were not of the theatre.... There was no one now with whom a bottle of old claret had so divine a flavour.... She would never have let him produce Ivanhoe. She would have read the book for him. She always used to stand between him and those idiots at the club.

He went to the tantalus on his sideboard and poured himself out a brandy and soda, and drank to Teresa's memory, and then to the portrait of his wife, who had been so wonderfully skilful in decorating the front of the house with Dukes, Duchesses, and celebrities, but it needed Teresa's power behind the scenes.

It was very distressing that all qualities could not be found in one woman, and a mocking litany floated through Sir Henry's brain, 'One for the front of the house, one for the back, one for paragraphs, one for posters, but a man for business.'

He lay back in his chair and cudgelled his brains for some means of turning Ivanhoe from a disastrous failure into an apparent success, but no idea came, and throwing out his long legs and caressing his round belly he said,—

'If I paint my nose red, and give myself two large eyebrows they'll laugh, and it might go. I must have a play in which I enter down the chimney....'

The telephone by his side rang.

'Yes. I'm terribly busy, terribly.... Very well. I'll ring as soon as I can see him.'

He put down the receiver, flung out his legs once more, and resumed his thoughts.

'I might pay a visit to America. They keep sending people over here.' But his memory twinged as he thought of the insulting criticisms he had encountered on his last visit to Broadway.

'Teresa would tell me what to do. Some one told me Scott was the next best thing to Shakespeare. Oh, well!'

He put his hand to a bell-button in the arm of his chair, and in a few moments his secretary ushered in Mr Charles Mann. Sir Henry rose, drew himself up to his full height, but even then had to look up at his visitor.

'How d'you do? I remember you as a boy, and I remember your father. I even remember his father at Drury Lane.... Pity you've broken the tradition. The public is proud of the old theatrical families.... I'm sorry you wouldn't take that part I offered you. I saw your photograph in the papers and your face was the very thing, and, besides, your return to the stage would have been interesting.'

Charles bristled, and flung his portfolio and large black hat down on the table.

'I have brought you my designs for Volpone.'

'For what?'

'Volpone—a comedy by Ben Jonson.'

'Oh, Ben Jonson!'

Sir Henry was depressed. He had met people before who had talked to him about the Old Dramatists.

Charles opened his portfolio.

'These are designs I have just completed. You see, classical, like Ben's mind.'

'It looks immensely high,' said Sir Henry, his eyes twinkling.

'That,' replied Charles, 'is what I want, so that the figures are dwarfed.'

'I should have to alter my proscenium,' chuckled Sir Henry, and Charles, who missed the chuckle, continued eagerly,—

'I should like it played by dolls.'

Sir Henry turned over the drawings and played with the money in his pocket.

'You never saw my King Lear, did you?'

'I have seen pictures of it. Too realistic. A visit to Stonehenge would have answered the same purpose. You would have then to make such a storm as would drown the storm in Lear.'

Sir Henry remembered his part and fetched up an enormous voice from his stomach and roared,—

'Rage, blow and drown the steeples.' Then he kept his voice rumbling in his belly and tapped with his foot like the bass-trumpet man in a street band.

'Superb,' cried Charles.

'My voice?' asked Sir Henry, now very pleased with himself.

'My drawings,' replied Charles, rubbing his thumb along a line that especially delighted him.

'O Heavens!' Sir Henry paid no further attention to the drawings and drawled, 'Wonderful thing the theatre.' There's life in it—life! I hate leaving it. You haven't been to my room before?'

'I once waited for two hours downstairs to ask you to give me a part. You didn't see me and I gave up acting.

'Oh! and now when I offer you a part you refuse it——'

'Things are very different now.... I have had a great welcome back to London.'

'What do you think of a national theatre?'

'Every nation, every city, ought to have its theatre.'

'Mine is the best theatre in London.'

'You won't do Volpone? It is one of the finest comedies ever written.'

'I never heard of its being done.'

Charles flung his drawings back into his portfolio, seized his hat, crammed it on to his head, and had reached the door when Sir Henry called him back.

'What do you say to The Tempest?'

'It doesn't need scenery.'

'Oh, come! The ship, the yellow sands. Prospero's cave—pictures all the way—and the masque.... I want to do The Tempest shortly and I should be glad of your assistance.'

'I should expect you to buy my drawings and to pay me ten thousand pounds.'

Sir Henry ignored that. He knew his man by reputation. Ten thousand pounds meant no more to him than one and sixpence. He merely mentioned the first figures that came into his head. Sir Henry resumed,—

'I want The Tempest to be my first Autumn production. I place my theatre at your disposal.... To be quite frank with you, that was why I offered you that part. The theatre wants something new. The Russian ballet has upset people. They are expecting something startling.... Poor old Smithson who has painted my scenery for twenty years is horrified when I suggest anything of the kind.'

'If I do The Tempest for you will you join my committee?'

'Er—I—er—You must give me time to think it over. You know we managers have to think of each other.'

Charles began to wish he had not come. The suggestion of mysterious influences behind Sir Henry alarmed him, and at home was the furious energy in Clara forcing him into the embraces of this huge machine of a theatre, which discarded his Volpone and required him to do something for which he had not the smallest inclination. Yet so implicit was his faith in her, so wonderful had been his life since she came into it, that he accepted the accuracy of her divination of the futility of his procedure through artists and literary persons, who would feed upon his fame and increase it to have more to devour.... He decided then to say no more about his committee for the present, to accept Sir Henry's offer, and to escape as quickly as possible from the stifling room, with its horrible drawings, and its atmosphere in which were blended a fashionable restaurant and a stockbroker's office. He had not felt so uncomfortable since he had been a schoolboy in the presence of his head master, and yet he enjoyed a European reputation, while outside the Anglo-Saxon world Sir Henry was hardly known.

The great actor condescendingly escorted the great artist down the heavily carpeted stairs to a private door which led to the dress circle. The theatre was in darkness. The seats were covered up in their white sheets, and Sir Henry looked round him and sighed,—

'Ah! cold, cold, a theatre soon grows cold. But it possesses you. Art is very like a woman. She only yields up her treasure to the purest passion.'

'Art has nothing to do with women,' Charles rapped out, and, as Sir Henry had only been making a phrase, he was not offended. Charles shook the large fat hand which was held out to him, and plunged into the street.... Ah! It was good to be in the air again, to gaze up at the sky, to see the passers-by moving about their business. There was a stillness about the theatre which made him think of Sir Henry in his room as rather like a large pale fish swimming about in a tank in a dark aquarium.... After his years of freedom in delightful countries, where people were in no hurry and were able most charmingly to do nothing in particular for weeks on end, the captivity of so eminent and powerful a person appalled and crushed him.... He had not encountered anything like it in his previous sojourn in London, and he was again possessed with the bewildered rage that had seized him when he saw the rebuilt station on his arrival. He had been out of it all for so long, yet he was of it, and he shuddered away from the increased captivity of London, yet longed to have been part of it.... It was almost bewilderingly a new city. During his absence, the immense change from horse to petrol-driven vehicles had taken place and a new style of architecture had been introduced. The air was cleaner: so were the streets. Shop windows were larger. There was everywhere more display, more colour, more and swifter movement, and yet in the theatre was that deadly stillness.

He turned into a magnificent shop, where all the flowers looked rather like little girls dressed up for a party, and ordered some roses to be sent to Clara, for whom he had begun to feel a rudimentary responsibility. It comforted him to do that. Somehow it broke the stillness which had infected him, and most profoundly shocked him, so different was it from the theatre in which he had been born and bred, the rather fatuous, very sentimental theatre which was inhabited by simple kind-hearted vagabonds, isolated from the world of morals and religion, yet passionately proud of their calling, and setting it above both morals and religion. But this theatre, magnificent in this new magnificent London, was empty and still. So much of the theatre that had been dear to him was gone, and he mourned for it, lamented, too, over his own folly, for he was suddenly brought face to face with the fact that the theatre he proposed so light-heartedly to overthrow, the theatre of the actor, had disappeared. In attacking it he was beating the air. He had to deal with a new enemy.

As he was emerging from St James's Park into Victoria Street a woman accosted him. He looked at her, did not recognise her, and moved to pass on, for he was fastidious and took no interest in chance women. She was a little woman, very alert, and she was rather poorly dressed. She was young, but already her lips had stiffened into the hardness of baffled hope and passion and her eyes smouldered with that extraordinary glow which rouses a pity as cold as ice.

'I saw you were back in the papers,' she said. 'It's a pity you can't hide yourself.'

Charles stared at her, stared and stared, cast about for some excuse for pretending not to know her but remained rooted.

'You're not so young as you were,' she went on. 'There's a lot of talk about you in the papers, but I know you; it's all talk.'

'My good woman,' said he, 'is that all you have to say?'

'It'll keep,' said she, and she turned abruptly and left him, feeling that all the strength had gone out of his legs, all the feeling from his bowels, leaving only a nauseating pity which brought up memory upon memory of horrible emotions, without any physical memory to fix them so that he was at their mercy. At last physical memories began to emerge, rather ridiculously, theatrical lodgings, provincial theatres, the arcades at Birmingham. And a blue straw hat that he had bought for her long ago; and at last her name. Kitty Messenger, and her mother, a golden-haired actress with a tongue like a flail in one temper, like the honey-seeking proboscis of a bee in another.

'I had forgotten,' said Charles to himself. 'I really had forgotten. Well—money will settle it. I shall have to do The Tempest for that fish.'

Thinking of the money restored his sense of serenity. Wonderful money that can swamp so many ills: money that means work done somewhere—work, the sole solace of human misery. But Charles had no notion of the relation between work and money, or that in using up large quantities of it he was diverting to his own uses more than his fair share of the comfort of humanity. He had so much to give if only humanity would take—and pay for it. What he had to give was beyond price, wherefore he had no qualms in setting his price high.... From The Tempest boundless wealth would flow. He quickly persuaded himself of that, and by the time he reached his furnished house had lulled his alarm to sleep and had allayed the disgust and loathing of the past roused in him by the meeting with Kitty Messenger.... So rosy had the vision become under the influence of his potential wealth that he met Clara without a qualm, and forgot even that Sir Henry was like a fish in an aquarium.

'We got on splendidly,' he said, 'and I am to have the whole theatre for The Tempest in the Autumn.'

'I told you I was right,' said she.

'Bless you, child,' he cried. 'You always are, always. And now we will go out and drink champagne—Here's a health unto His Majesty, with a fal-lal-la.'

He was like a rebellious boy, and Clara disliked that mood in him, because he was rather rough and cumbrous in his humour, cracked gusty and rather stupid jokes, ate voraciously, and drank like a carter.

They went to a most elegant restaurant, where their entry created a stir, and it was whispered from end to end of the room who he was. And the girl with him? People shrugged.... Clara's eyes were alight, and she looked from table to table at the sleek, well-groomed men, and the showy women with their gaudy hair ornaments, bare powdered shoulders, and beautiful gowns. She looked from face to face searching eagerly for—she knew not what; power, perhaps, some power which should justify their costly elegance. This hurt as a lie hurt her, because, as she gazed from person to person, she could not divine the individuality beneath the uniform, and she was still young enough to wish to do so.... Meanwhile, as she gazed, Charles ate and drank lustily, and, it must be admitted, noisily. There was no suppression of individuality about Charles. It brimmed over in him. He had gone to that restaurant to enjoy himself; not because it was a place frequented by successful persons.... Clara's eyes came back to him. Yes, she preferred her Charles to every one else, if only—if only he would realise that she thought of other things besides himself.

From a table near by a very good-looking man came and tapped Charles on the shoulder.

'There's no mistaking you, old chap,' he said. 'I'm just back from America. They think a lot of you over there since your conquest of London.'

'You haven't met my wife,' said Charles, with his mouth full. 'What a splendid place this is! Chicken, this is Freeland Moore. We were together in the old days with the Old Man.'

'I was with him when he died,' said Freeland, 'died in harness. There's no one like him now.'

'Who?' asked Clara, alive at once to even the memory of a great personality.

'Henry Irving. He was a prince, and kept royalty alive in England. It seems a long time ago now. Won't you come over and join us for coffee, when you have finished? I am with Miss Julia Wainwright; she's with us at the Imperium. Not for long, I'm afraid. It's a wash-out.'

'Ah!' said Charles, remembering Sir Henry's depressed glance round the theatre, and he saw himself restoring splendour and success to the Imperium.

After dinner they went over to Mr Moore's table, and Clara, shaking hands with Miss Wainwright, warmed to the large, generous creature with her expansive bosom, her drooping figure, her tinted face and hair and ludicrously long soft eyes. There was room in Miss Wainwright for a dozen Claras. She looked sentimentally and with amazement spreading in ripples over her big face at the girl's wedding-ring and said,—

'So pleased to meet you, child. I made Freeland go over and fetch you.... You're not on the stage, are you?'

'No,' replied Clara, 'but I'm going to be.'

'It is not what it was,' resumed Miss Wainwright, sipping her crème de menthe.' The Wainwrights have always been in the profession, but I'm sending my boy to a public-school.... You're not English, are you?'

'Oh, yes,' answered Clara, 'but I have always lived abroad in Italy and Germany and France with my grandfather. My father and mother died in India, but I was born in London.'

'If you want to get about,' said Miss Wainwright, 'there's nothing like the profession. I've been in Australia, Ceylon, South Africa, America, but never Canada.... I'm just back from America with Freeland, and we took the first thing that came along—Ivanhoe. It's a lovely show but the play's no good.... Why not come and see it? Freeland, go and telephone Mr Gillies to keep a box for Mrs Mann.'

Freeland obeyed, treading the floor of the restaurant as though it were a stage.

'I suppose you're not sorry you gave up acting, Charles,' said Miss Wainwright, with her most expansive affability. She oozed charm, and surrounded Charles and Clara with it, so that almost for the first time Clara felt that she really was identified with her great man. Those who worshipped at the shrine of his greatness always regarded her as an adjunct and their politeness chilled her, but Miss Wainwright swept greatness aside and was delightfully concerned only with what she regarded as a striking and very happy couple.

Charles, who was absorbed in eating an orange, made no reply other than a grimace.

'I don't know how you did it.... I couldn't. Once a player, always a player—money or no money, and there's a great deal more money in it than there used to be.'

Freeland Moore returned, announced that a box had been reserved, and, telling Miss Wainwright that it was time to go, he helped her on with her wrap of swan's down and velvet....

'I'll come and call if I may,' said Miss Wainwright, with a billowing bow, and, with a magnificent setting of all her sails she moved away from the table, and, taking the wind of approval from her audience, the other diners, she preened her way out.

'Pouf! Pah! Pah!' said Charles, shaking back his mane. 'Pouf! The stink of green-paint.'

'I'm sure she's the kindest woman in the world.'

'So are they all,' growled Charles, 'dripping with kindness or burning with jealousy.... The theatrical woman!—It's a modern indecency.'

'And suppose I became one.'

'You couldn't.'

'But I'm going to.'

'You'd never stand it for a week, my dear. I'd ... I'd ...'

'What would you do?'

'I'd forbid it.'

'Then I should not stay with you.... You know that.'

Charles knew it. He had learned painfully that though she had some respect for his opinion, she had none for his authority.

He had more coffee, liqueurs, fruit, a cigar, gave the waiter a tip which sent him running to fetch the noble diner's overcoat, and, hailing a taxi, they drove the few hundred yards to the Imperium, where he growled, grunted, muttered, dashed his hands through his hair, and she sat with her eyes glued on the stage, and her brows puckered as the dull, illiterate version of Scott's novel, denuded of all dramatic quality, was paraded before her.... In an interval, Charles asked her what she thought of it.

'It is death,' she said. 'It is nothing but money.'

'Money,' repeated Charles. 'Money.... Whose money? ...' And he suddenly felt again that splendid feeling of confidence. With his Tempest all the money in that place should sustain beauty, and every ugly thing, every ugly thought should disappear. He touched Clara's hair, and for the first time, somewhat to his alarm, realised that she was something more than an amusing and delightful child, and that he had married her.

He looked down from the box into the stalls, and wondered if behind the white-shirt fronts and the bare bosoms there were also anxious thoughts and uneasy emotions, and if everybody had troubles that lurked in the past and might race ahead of them to meet them in the future.... Then he laughed at himself. After all, whatever happened, his fame grew, and he went on being Charles Mann.

IV

BEHIND THE SCENES

Miss Julia Wainwright might be sentimental, and she might be jealous, but she was shrewd, and she understood intuitively the relationship between Charles and Clara. At first she refused to believe that they were married, as Charles was notoriously careless in these matters, but when she was faced with the fact her warm heart warned her of tragedy and she took it upon herself to inform Clara of the mysterious difficulties of married life, especially for two sensitive people.

'Charles wants a stupid woman and you want a stupid man,' she said.

Clara, of course, refused to believe that, and said that with a stupid woman Charles would just rot away in a studio and grow more and more unintelligible.

'Never mind, then,' said Miss Wainwright. 'I'll show you round. If you are meant for the theatre nothing can keep you away from it. The only thing I can see against you is that you're a lady.'

'Is that against me?' asked Clara, a little astonished.

'Well,' replied Miss Wainwright, 'we're different.'

And indeed Clara discovered very soon that actors and actresses were different from other people, because they concealed nothing. Their personalities were entirely on view, and exposed for sale. They reserved nothing. Such as they were, they were for the theatre and for no other purpose, but to be moved at a moment's notice from theatre to theatre, from town to town, from country to country. They were refreshing in their frank simplicity, compared with which life with Charles was oppressive in its complexity.

As she surveyed the two, Clara was torn asunder for a time and was reluctant to take the plunge, and yet she knew that this was the world to which Charles belonged, this world of violent contrasts, of vivid light and shadowy darkness, of painted illusion and the throbbing reality of the audience, of idle days and feverish nights. His mind was soaked in it, and his soul, all except that obscure part of it that delighted in flowers and in her own youth, hungered for it, and yet it seemed she had to force him into it.... If only he had a little more will, a little more intelligence.

Often she found herself thinking of him as 'poor Charles,' and then she set her teeth, and shook back her hair, and vowed that no one should ever think of her as 'poor Clara.' ... Life had been so easy when they had drifted together from studio to studio, but it threatened to be mighty difficult now that they had squared up to life and to this huge London....

Ivanhoe staggered on for six weeks and then collapsed, and an old successful melodrama was revived to carry the Imperium over the early summer months. In this production, as a protégée of Miss Wainwright's, Clara played a small part in which she had ten words to say.... She was quite inaudible though she seemed to herself to be using every atom of voice in her slim young body, but always her voice seemed to fill her own head until it must surely burst.

'Nerves,' said Miss Wainwright. 'You'll get your technique all right, and then you won't hear yourself speak any more than you do when you are talking in a room. It's just a question of losing yourself, and that you learn to do unconsciously.... It'll come all right, dearie. It'll come all right.'

Clara was determined that it should come all right, though she knew it would not until she had overcome her loathing of painting her face, and pencilling her eyes, and dabbing red paint into the corners of them. So much did she detest this at first that her personality repudiated this false projection of herself and left her helpless. Over and over again she said to herself,—

'I shall never be an actress. I shall never be an actress....' But then again she said, 'I will.'

There was a violence in appearing in the glaring light before so many people which offended her deeply, and yet she knew that she was wrong to be offended, because the people had come not to look at her, Clara Day, but at the false projection of Clara Day which was needed for the play.... Her objection was moral, and so strong that it made her really ill, and it was with the greatest difficulty that she could keep going at all, but not a word did she say to a soul. She fought through it with clenched teeth, going through agony night after night, smiling when it was over, going home exhausted, and dreading the coming of the morrow when it would all have to be borne again....

She used to look at the others and wonder if they had been through the same thing, but it was plain to her clear eyes that they had nearly all accepted without a struggle, and had surrendered to the false projection of themselves which the theatre needed. Stage-fright they knew, but not this moral struggle in which, determined not to be beaten, she fought on.

Rehearsals she enjoyed. Then the actors were at their indolent best, and the half-lit stage was full of a dim, suggestive beauty, which entirely disappeared by the time the scene-painter, the lime-light man, and the stage-carpenter had done their work. Often at rehearsal, words would give her the shock of truth that in performance would just puzzle her by their banality; voices would seem to come from some remote recess of life; movements would take on dignity; the players seemed indeed to move and live in an enchanted world.... And so, off the stage, they did.

Miss Wainwright and Mr Freeland Moore, who had played together for so many years, were idyllic lovers, though he had a wife in America, and she a husband who had gone his ways. To them there were no further stages of love than those which are shown to the Anglo-American public. For them there were but Romeo and Juliet at the ball with no contending houses to plague them. They lived in furnished flats and paid their way, impervious to every conspiracy of life to bring them down to earth.... Both adored Clara, both soon accepted her and Charles as lovers even more perfect than themselves, because younger, and both were never tired of thinking what kindness they could next do to help their friends.

And Clara struggled on. Sometimes she could have screamed with rage against the theatre, and these people whose enchantment had been won by the sacrifice of the fiery essence of themselves, so that they accepted meekly insults from the manager, from the stage-manager, from the very dressing-room staff of the theatre, who could make their lives uncomfortable. She understood then what it was that had driven Charles out, and made him so reluctant to return, and why his immense talent, which should have been expressed in terms of the theatre, was reduced to making what, after all, were only notes on paper. Convinced that she could help to bring him back from exile, she struggled on, though the strain increased as more and more fiercely she had to pit her will against the powerful machinery of the theatre.

Everybody was kind to her, though many were alarmed by the intent force with which she set about her work. Very often she had no energy left for conversation, and would then take refuge in a book, a volume of Meredith, or Bernard Shaw, Schopenhauer or Browning, who had been the poet of her first discovery of the world of books. That frightened off the young men, who were at first greatly taken with her charm. They were subdued themselves as everybody was, from the business manager down, but her silence chilled and alarmed them.... Except those she bought herself, she never saw a book in the theatre.

At first, full of Charles's fierce denunciation of Sir Henry Butcher, she detested the man, who seemed to her like some monster who absorbed all the vitality of the rest and used it to inflate his egoism. He never spoke to her for some weeks, and she avoided meeting him, did not wish to speak to him, felt, indeed, that she was perhaps using him a little unfairly in turning his theatre to her own ends, forcing herself to accept it in order to make things easier for Charles, to whom she used to go with a most vivid caricature of Sir Henry at rehearsals.

Until he appeared there was a complete languor upon the stage. The actors and actresses still had upon them the mood of breakfast-in-bed; some looked as though they were living in the day before yesterday and had given up all hope of catching up with the rest of the world; some of the men talked sport; all the women chattered scandal; some read their letters, others the telegrams by which their correspondence was conducted. In none was the slightest indication of preparedness for work, for the thoughts of all were obviously miles away from the theatre.... Stagehands moved noisily about. They, at least, were conscious of earning their living. Messages were brought in from the stage-door. Back cloths were let down: the fire-proof curtain descended slowly, and remained shutting out the vast and gloomy spaces of the auditorium, also a melancholy gray-haired lady who was the widow of the author of the melodrama in rehearsal.

Sir Henry appeared with a bald-headed Frenchman, with a red ribbon in his button-hole, his secretary, carrying a shorthand notebook, and a stout, thick-set Jew, who waited obsequiously for the great actor to take further notice of him. Sir Henry talked volubly and laughed uproariously. He was very happy and he beamed round the stage at his company. The ladies said,—

'Good-morning, Sir Henry.'

The gentlemen said,—

'Morning.'

Sir Henry gesticulating violently turned away and began in French to tell a humorous story to which the Frenchman said, 'Oui, oui,' and the Jew said, 'Oui, oui,' while Clara, who could speak French as fluently as English, understood not a word of it; but this morning she liked Sir Henry because he was so happy and because he was so full of vitality.

His business with the Jew and the Frenchman was soon settled fairly to their satisfaction. They went away, and Sir Henry began to collect his thoughts. He turned to his secretary and asked,—

'We are rehearsing a play, eh? All these ladies and gentlemen are not here for nothing, eh? What play?'

'The Golden Hawk.'

'Ah! Yes.... I have rehearsed so many plays.... I am thinking of my big Autumn success.... I can feel it in the air. I can always feel it. I felt that Ivanhoe was no good, but I was over-persuaded. My instinct is always right. The business men and the authors are always wrong....'

He flew into a sudden passion, and roared, 'Who the hell let down the fire-proof? I hate the thing. Take it away. How can a man rehearse to a fire-proof curtain? Take it away. Send it to the London County Council who inflicted it on me. I don't want it.'

The stage-manager shouted to a man in the flies,—

'Fire-proof up.'

'I never let it down,' came a voice.

'Who did then?'

The stage-manager came over to where Clara was standing and pressed a button. The heavy fire-proof curtain slowly rose to reveal the author's widow sitting patiently with the dark empty theatre for background.

Who's that lady?' asked Sir Henry.

'The author's widow,' replied the secretary.

'I was afraid it was his ghost,' said Sir Henry, with his mischievous chuckle. He went to her and chatted to her for a few moments about her late husband, who had been something of a figure in his time and had made a career in the traffic in French plays adapted for the British theatre.

A scene or two was rehearsed, when an artist arrived with a model for a 'set' for The School for Scandal. The company gathered round and admired, while Sir Henry sat and played with it, trying various lighting effects with an electric torch.

'No,' he said, 'you can't get the effects with electric light that you used to be able to obtain with gas.... Give me gas. The theatre has never been the same. This electric light is cold. It is killing the theatre.'

When the artist had gone, a journalist arrived for an interview, which was granted on condition that an article by Sir Henry on British Audiences was printed, and for the rest of the morning the secretary was kept busy taking down notes for the article.

For Clara it was a very delightful morning. Her own scene was not reached, and she sat happily in a corner by the proscenium turning over the pages of her book, watching Sir Henry's antics, appreciating the skill with which, in spite of all his digressions, he kept things lively, and managed to get the work he wanted out of his company....

As the players dispersed, he stood in the middle of the stage and sighed heavily. Clara was for stealing away, when he strode across to her, seized her by the arm, and said in his deep rolling voice,—

'Don't go, little girl. Don't go.'

'But I want to go,' replied she. 'And I'm not a little girl. I'm a married lady.'

'Ah! marriage makes us all so old,' said Sir Henry, with a gallant sigh.... 'You're the little girl who reads books, aren't you? I've heard of you. I've written a book or two, but I never read them. I have quite a lot of books upstairs in my room—given me by the authors.... Won't you come to lunch? I feel I could talk to you.'

He had suddenly dropped his mannerisms, his affectation of thinking of a thousand and one things at once, and was a simple and very charming person of no particular age, position, or period—just a human being who wanted for a little to be at his ease. He took Clara by the arm, and, regardless of the staring eyes of those whom they met in the corridors, swept her along to the room which Charles had likened to an aquarium. Then he made her sit in the most comfortable chair, while he bestrode another not a yard away, and stared at her with his extraordinary eyes, which never had one but always the suggestion of a hundred different expressions.

'I love my room,' he said, 'it is the only place I have in the world. Don't you like it?'

'It is very quiet,' said Clara.

Sir Henry rang a bell and ordered lunch to be brought up, vol-au-vents, cold chicken, Crème Caramel, champagne.

'You're not old enough to understand food,' he said. 'That comes with the beginning of wisdom.'

'But I understand food very well,' protested Clara, 'my grandfather knew all there was to know about it.'

'Ah! You are used to old men, eh? Boys don't exist for you, eh?'

With extraordinary gusto he produced a photograph album, and showed her portraits of himself at various ages, slim and romantic at twenty, at forty impressively Byronic, at fifty monumentally successful—and 'present day.' He showed her portraits of his mother and father, his wife, his children, Miss Teresa Chesney in her pieces, his various leading ladies, his sisters who had both married noble lords, and of a large number of actors and actresses who had passed through his company. Of them he talked with real knowledge and enthusiasm. He adored acting for its own sake, and as he talked brought all these performers vividly before Clara's eyes so that she must accept the validity of his criticism: he knew, or seemed to know, exactly what each could do or could not do, though it was difficult to understand how he could ever have found time to see them all. Whether or not he had done so, he had exactly weighed up the value of their theatrical personalities, and it was in those and those alone that he was interested. As human beings, he was indifferent to them, though he spoke of them all with the exaggerated affection common to the theatre—'dear old Arthur' ... 'adorable Lily' ... 'delicious Irene. Ah! she's a good woman.' He talked rhapsodically, and his talk rather reminded Clara of Liszt's music, until lunch came, and then his greedy pleasure in the food made her think of certain gluttonous musicians she had known in Germany. He ate quickly, and his eyes beamed satisfaction at her, so young, so fresh, so altogether unusual and challenging.... She would neither eat nor drink, so absorbed was she in this strange man who so overwhelmingly imposed his personality upon her until she felt that she was merely part of the furniture of the room.

When he had done eating and drinking, he lit a cigar and lay back in his large chair, and closed his eyes in the ecstatic distention of his surfeit. After a grunt or two, he turned suddenly and asked with a strange intensity,—

'Charles Mann—is he a genius?'

'Of course,' replied Clara.

'Then why does he talk so much?'

'He works very hard.'

'Hm!'

'You can't expect me to discuss him.'

'No, no. I only think it is a pity he gave up acting. He's lost touch with the public.... I've tried it at intervals; giving up acting, I mean. The public lose interest, and no amount of advertising will get it back.'

'It is for the artist to command the public,' said Clara, rather uncomfortably feeling that she was only an echo. It was a very curious thing that words in this room lost half their meaning, and she, who was accustomed to giving all her words their precise value, was rather at a loss.

'Little girl,' said Sir Henry, 'I feel that you understand me. That is rare. After all, we actors are human. We are governed by the heart in a world that is standing on its head.'

He took out a little book and made a note of that last observation. Then with a sigh he leaned over and held Clara's hands, looked long into her large dark eyes, and said,—

'With such purity you could outstare the angels.'

For answer Clara outstared him, and he dropped her hands and began to hum. 'Opera!' he said. 'I feel opera in the air; music invading the theatre, uplifting the souls of the people.... Ah! life is not long enough....'

Clara began to feel sorry for him though she knew in her heart that this was precisely what he wanted.

'You mustn't be angry,' he rumbled in his deepest bass, 'if I tell you that Charles Mann ought to have his neck wrung.'

'But—you are going to do his Tempest?'

'If it were not for you, little girl, I would not have him near the theatre,' said Sir Henry, with a sudden heat.

'How dare you talk like that?' Clara was all on fire. 'It is an honour for you to be associated with him at all.'

Sir Henry laughed.

'We know our Charles,' he said. 'We knew his father. We are not all so young as you.'

Clara hid her alarm, but it was as though the ground had suddenly opened and swallowed her up, as though the London about which she had been hovering in delighted excitement had engulfed her. And then she felt that she was failing Charles.

'I won't allow you to talk like that. I won't let Charles do The Tempest at all, if you talk like that. He is a very great genius, and it is your duty to let the public see his work. It is shameful that all his life people have talked about him, and have never helped him to reach his natural position. He has been an exile and but for me would still be so.'

'But for you,' repeated Sir Henry.... 'Would you like to play Miranda? A perfect Miranda, but where is Ferdinand?'

Clara was alarmed at this prospect. She had read The Tempest with her grandfather, and knew long passages by heart. Its beauty was in her blood, and she could not reconcile it with this theatre of Sir Henry Butcher's. Sitting with him in the heart of it, she felt trapped and as though all her dreams and purposes had been sponged out. Never before had she even suspected that her freedom could be extinguished; never before had she even been anywhere near feeling that her will might break and leave her at the mercy of circumstances. She clutched desperately at her loyalty to Charles, and she summoned up all her will only to find that it forced her to regard him, to weigh and measure him as a man.... He and she were no longer exiles, wandering untrammelled in strange lands, but here in London among their own people, confronted with their responsibility to the world outside themselves and to each other. She was prepared to accept it, but was he?

V

THE OTHER WOMAN

Clara could hardly remember ever having been unhappy before. All her life she had done exactly as she wished to do. Her grandfather had never gainsaid her: had always indulged her every caprice, and had supported her even when she had been to all outward seeming in the wrong. He used to say in his whimsical manner that explosions never did any one any harm.... 'It is all wrong,' thought she, as she left the sanctum, and she was alarmed for Charles as she was still vibrant from the hostility in the actor-manager. What was the occasion of it? She could not guess. It was incredible to her that any one could object to Charles, so kindly, so industrious, so simple in his work and his belief in himself. People laughed at him sometimes indulgently, but that was a very different thing to this hostility, this cold, implacable condemnation. That was beyond her, for she had been brought up in a school of absolute tolerance except of the vulgar and ill-mannered.

Her quick wits worked on this new situation. She divined that Sir Henry resented the intrusion of a personality as powerful as his own and the check upon his habit of exuding patronage. His theatre had always been animated with his own vitality, and he obviously resented a position in which he had to employ that of another and openly to acknowledge it.

'He wants to patronise Charles,' thought Clara, and then she decided that for once in a way it would be a good thing for Charles to submit to it. It must be either that or his chosen interminable procedure by committee.

She decided to take a walk to think it over, and as she moved along Piccadilly towards the Green Park, where she proposed to ponder her problem, she had a distressing idea that she was followed. Several times she turned and stopped, but she could see no one who could be pursuing her. Men stared at her, but none dared molest so purposeful a young woman.... She stayed for some time in the Green Park, turning over and over in her mind how best she could engage Sir Henry's interest without aggravating his hostility to Charles, and still she was aware of eyes upon her.... She walked away very fast, but as she turned out into the roadway in front of Buckingham Palace she turned, stopped, and was accosted by a little dark woman with a smouldering fury in her eyes.

'Are you Mrs Mann?' said the woman.

'Yes,' said Clara, at once on her guard.

'So am I,' rejoined the other woman.

'Oh, no!' said Clara, with a smile that barely concealed the catch at her heart.

'Oh, yes,' replied the other woman. 'I should think I was married to him before you were born. And I wasn't the only one. He left the country——'

Clara turned on her heel and walked away. The other woman followed her breathing heavily and gasping out details.

'You horrible woman,' cried Clara, unable at last to bear any more. 'Go away...' And in her heart she said—

'It is my fault. I made him marry me.'

Still the other woman was at her heels, babbling and gasping out her sordid little tragedy—-two children, no money, her mother to keep.

Clara was stunned and so nauseated that she could not speak. Only in her mind the thought went round and round,—

'It is my fault.... It is my fault.'

But Charles ought to have told her. He ought not to have been so will-less, so ready to fall in with every suggestion she made.

'I must have this out at once,' she said, and hailing a taxi she bundled the other woman into it and drove home. Charles was out. She ordered tea, and quickly had the whole story out—the lodgings in Birmingham, the intrigue, the ultimatum, Charles's catastrophic collapse and inertia, years of poverty in London going from studio to studio, lodging to lodging: his flight—with another woman: her struggles, her present hand to mouth existence on the outskirts of the musical comedy theatre.

'I wouldn't have spoken,' said Kitty, 'if you hadn't been so young.'

'I should have thought that was a reason for keeping quiet,' replied Clara, who was now almost frozen with horror.

'You were bound to hear sooner or later.'

Charles came in followed by Mr Clott. He was in the highest spirits and called out,—

'Darling, Lord Verschoyle is interested.'

His jaw dropped as he saw Kitty there at tea. His pince-nez fell off his nose, and he stood pulling at his necktie for a few seconds. Then he gave Mr Clott a commission to perform, and stood looking with horror, disgust, and loathing at the unhappy Kitty.... It was Clara who first found her voice,—

'I ... I brought her here, Charles,' she said. 'I thought it would save us all—trouble.'

In a tone icy with fury he said,—

'If you will go quietly, I will write to you. Please leave your address, and I will write to you.'

Kitty hoped for a moment that he was talking to Clara, but his fury was so obviously concentrated on her that at last she rose and said meekly,—

'Yes, Charles.'

'You will find a writing-block by the telephone in the hall. Please leave your address there.'

'Yes, Charles.'

With that she left the room. Charles and Clara were too much for her. All her venom trickled away in a thin stream of dread as she felt the gathering rage in the two of them. At the same time she had some exultation in having produced a storm so much beyond her own capacity.

'You did not tell me,' said Clara, when Kitty had gone.

'Honestly, honestly I had forgotten.'

'Forgotten! You did not tell me. You did not need her to come into this house to remember.'

'No.'

'What do you mean, then? You had forgotten?'

'Honestly, I never thought of it until one day when I met her in the street.'

'Does everybody know?'

'Yes. I don't conceal these things.'

'You concealed it from me, from me, from me....'

'Yes. I never thought of it. She'd gone out of my life years ago.'

'Have many women gone out of your life?'

He blushed.

'A good many.... I never meant to conceal it. Truly I didn't. I just didn't mention it.... You were so happy, chicken; so was I. I hadn't been happy before—not like that.'

'She can ruin us.... Do you know that? She has only to go up to the nearest policeman and ruin us. Do you know that?'

'She won't.... She'd never dare.'

'She would.... I'm young. That's the unpardonable thing in a woman....'

'I don't understand,' said Charles, sitting down suddenly. And quite perceptibly he did not understand that any one, man or woman, could deliberately hurt another.

'But you must understand,' she cried. 'You must understand.... You must protect yourself.'

'How can I?'

'She is your wife. You must give her what she wants.'

'Money? Oh, yes.'

'You fool,' said Clara, in exasperation, 'you've married me. If she moves at all you will be ruined. You will be sent to prison.'

'Do you want to get out of it?' he asked.

'I? No.... I want to protect you.... Oh, it's my fault. It's my fault I thought I could help you. I thought I could help you.... I could have helped you if only you had told me.... You must have known. You couldn't imagine that you could come back to London and not be——'

'But I did,' he said. 'I never thought of it. I never do think of anything except in terms of my work.... I'll tell Clott to see to it.'

Clara clenched her fists until her nails dug into the palms of her hands.

'I shall have to leave you,' she said at last. 'I shall have to leave you.'

She pulled off her wedding-ring

'Perhaps I'd better go away,' he muttered at last very slowly. 'It's a pity. Everything was going so well. Lord Verschoyle is deeply interested. He has two hundred thousand a year.'

Clara laughed at him.

'He is willing to sit on my committee.'

'Does he know?'

'No.'

'But can't you see that these people ought to know.'

'No. What has it got to do with my work?'

'To you nothing. To them everything. They can't support you if they know——'

'But they don't know.'

'You are in that woman's hands. So am I. You can't expect me to live upon her sanction.'

This was a new aspect of the matter to Charles, who had never admitted the right of any other person to interfere in his affairs. It hurt him terribly as it slowly dawned upon him that the miserable Kitty had behind her the whole force of the law.

'Oh, good God!' he said. 'I'm a criminal. Oh, good God! This is serious.'

'I'm glad you realise it at last,' said she.

He broke down and wept, and began to tumble out the whole ridiculous story of his life; his perpetual disappointment: his terror of being bound down to anything except the work in which he felt so free, so wholly master of himself and his destiny; his delight in at last finding in her a true companion who, unlike all other women, allowed him to be something more than her possession.

'I'm afraid,' he said in the end, 'that I have never understood women.'

'Leave it to me.' Poor Clara felt that if she tried to explain any more her head would burst.

He looked up at her gratefully and was at once happy again.

'It was my fault,' said Clara. 'It wouldn't have happened if I'd thought about life at all. But it was so wonderful being with you and making your work come to life that I never thought about the rest.... I never looked at it from the woman's point of view, as, being a woman, I ought to have done.... I think the shock has made me a woman.... I don't think anything will ever make you a man.'

Charles gaped at her, but was not the least bit hurt. He did not particularly want to be a man as manhood is generally understood.

'Yes,' he said, 'Lord Verschoyle is deeply interested, and he has two hundred thousand a year.'

'Wait a moment,' replied Clara, 'I'll go and see if she has left her address.'

She ran downstairs, but Kitty had left no address. As Clara, considering the matter, decided that meant either that she intended to make trouble or that she had good reason for waiting before she made it.

When she returned, Charles was lover-like in his gratitude, but she repulsed him, told him that he must get on with his designs for The Tempest and she would see what could be done about his troubles. For the present, for a little while at all events, she proposed to leave him and to stay with Julia Wainwright.

'I may have to tell her,' she said, 'but I don't think so.... I won't let this woman ruin you, Charles.'

'I have hurt you far more than I have hurt her,' he said miserably. 'I suppose things will never be the same. You'll always feel that I am keeping things from you....'

'No. No. I know that is all that matters.... It is just the law that is somehow wrong, giving advantage to any one who is mean enough to take it.... But women are mean.'

'Not you.'

'No. I do understand you, Charles, but I'm so hurt. I'm so tired I don't think I can stand much more.'

'I'll do anything you want.'

'Then leave it to me.... The chief thing is your work, Charles. That is all of you that matters.'

This was entirely Charles's view of himself, and, as he could not see, yet, the effect of the intrusion of Kitty upon the brave girl who had so childishly accepted his childishness he was unperturbed and free from all anxiety.... So far his new career in London had been a triumphant success, and it seemed to him incredible that it could be checked by such a trifle as a forgotten wife. He thought of the money that should come from the Imperium: money meant power, power meant the removal of all disagreeable obstacles from his path. He licked his lips.... England understood money and nothing else. He would talk to England in her own language and when he had caught her attention he would speak his own.... Things were going so splendidly: a man like himself was not going to be upset by trifles. He had worked in exile for so long: surely, surely he would be able to reap his reward.

Clara meanwhile was shocked almost out of her youth. She did not weep. There were no tears in her eyes in which there slowly gathered a fierce expression of passionate pain. The bloom of youth was on her cheeks, upon her lips, in all her still unformed features, but in her eyes suddenly was the knowledge of years, concentrated, tyrannous, and between this knowledge and her will there was set up a remorseless conflict, from which she found relief only in a new gaiety and love of fun.

It was impossible to discuss the matter any further with Charles, and without a word to him she went away to Miss Wainwright's flat. That good creature took her in without a word, without even a mute curiosity. People's troubles were their own affair, and she knew that they needed to be alone with them. She gave Clara her bedroom and absented herself as much as possible, and kept Freeland out of the way.

The flat was luxuriously but monstrously furnished. Its frank, opulent ugliness was a relief to the girl after the rarefied atmosphere of aesthetics in which for three years she had lived with Charles, upon whom all her thoughts were still concentrated. Of herself she had no thought. It did not concern her what she was called: wife or mistress. She was Clara Day and would remain so whatever happened to her. She had forced Charles to marry her in order to protect him and to help him, and she had brought him into danger of imprisonment.... It was perfectly true; Charles could not protect himself because he could not learn that others were not as kindly as himself. He had been trapped into marriage with that vulgar and venomous woman. He could not speak of it because he loathed it so much.... She found excuses for him, for herself she sought none, and at the back of all her thoughts was her firm will that he should succeed. Yes, she thought, it was a good thing to leave him for a while. She had been with him too much, too near him.

It was a great comfort to be with Julia and Freeland, that unreal Romeo and Juliet of middle age. They were very proud of her, and elated to have her with them, took her everywhere, introduced her to all their friends, and insisted upon her being photographed for the Press, and in due course she had the shock of seeing her own features, almost more than life-size, exhibited to the hurrying crowds on the station-platforms. She was called Clara Day, Sir Henry Butcher's youngest and prettiest recruit. From the shy, studious little girl who sat close and, if possible, hidden during rehearsals, she found that she had become in the estimation of the company one of themselves. It was known that she had had lunch alone with Sir Henry, and the publication of her photograph sealed her young reputation. With the interest of the Chief, and influence in the Press, it was accepted that she would go far. That she was Mrs Charles Mann was whispered, for apparently she only had been ignorant of the impediment.

She apprehended the situation instinctively. Her mind recoiled from it. She felt trapped. Whichever way she moved she would injure him.... She ought to have kept quietly in the background, and let him go his own way. By forcing him into the theatre he and his affairs were exposed to the glaring light of publicity through her own impetuous ambition for him.

Soon she was in an intolerable agony. She wrote to Charles every day, and saw him occasionally, but was tortured every moment with the idea that her mere presence was injurious to him, and might call down an attack from the jealous Kitty at any moment. On the other hand, at any moment some journalist might seize on the story of her arrival in London with Charles, and publish the fact of their marriage.... She stayed on with Julia, and let the days go by until at last she felt that it was unfair to her kind friends. One night, therefore, after the theatre, she went into Julia's bedroom, and sat perched at the end of her bed, with her knees tucked under her chin, and said,—

'I'm not Charles's wife, Julia.'

'I know that,' replied the kind creature.

'But I am married to him.'

'Good God!' Julia sat up and clasped her hand to her capacious bosom.... 'Not a ceremony!'

'Yes. In an office near the Strand.'

'My dear child, my dear, dear child,' Julia began to weep. 'It's ... it's ... it's ...'

'I know what it is,' said Clara, setting her jaw. 'I don't know what to do.'

'You must never see him again.'

'But I must. I am married to him inside me. He can't do anything without me. I've made him come over here....'

'Didn't you know?'

'I knew nothing except that I loved him.'

'But people can't love like that.'

'I do.'

'He ran away from all that—and there were other things.... Oh, my dear, dear child, have you nobody belonging to you?'

'Only Charles. And I've hurt him.'

'What does he say?'

'He doesn't seem to realise....'

'I'd like to thrash him within an inch of his life.... The only thing to be thankful for is that you are not married to him. Not realise, indeed! He walked out of his marriage like a man bilking his rent.'

'He is an artist. His work is more important to him than anybody.'

Julia wept and wailed. 'The scoundrel! The scoundrel! The blackguard!'

'I won't have you calling him names. I won't have it. I won't have it,' cried Clara, her feelings finding vent in an outburst of temper. 'And you're not to tell a soul, not even Freeland. I won't have anybody interfering. I will handle this myself because I know more about it than anybody else.... It doesn't help me at all to hear you abusing Charles. It only hurts me.... I've made a mistake, and I am going through with it.'

'But you can't live with him.'

'You live with Freeland.'

'Yes. But we're not married, so nobody worries; at least I am married, so is Freeland. That makes it all right. If people are married it is different.'

The complications of the position were beyond Julia's intelligence, and she began to laugh hysterically. Clara laughed, too, but from genuine amusement. The world certainly did look very funny from the detachment now forced upon her: deliciously funny, and Charles appeared in her thoughts as a kind of Harlequin dancing through the world, peering into the houses where people were captive, tapping the doors with his wand so that they opened, but no one never came out.

'I'll take you to my lawyer,' said Julia, at last, with a fat sob.

'I want no lawyers,' snapped Clara defiantly. 'Charles hates that woman and she knows it. She won't try to get him back.'

'Yes. But she won't stand you're being with him.'

'Then I'll live alone, and help Charles in my own way.'

'Help yourself first, lovey; then you can help other people.'

'I don't believe it. If you help yourself, you are kept so busy doing it that you don't know the other people are there.'

Of course Julia told Freeland, and in the morning he came tapping at Clara's door. She admitted him. His rather faded, handsome face wore a very serious expression, more serious indeed than was warranted either by the feeling in his heart or the thought in his head. It was a very serious situation, and he had assumed the appropriate manner.... Clara had slept soundly, and her fund of healthy good spirits made it possible for her to regard the whole complication as, in itself, rather superficial. The sun was shining in upon the mirror of her dressing-table, upon her silver brushes, upon the portrait of Julia in a silver frame, and upon the new frock which had come only the day before from the dressmaker. With the sun shining, and the eager thought of Charles in her heart, Clara could have no anxiety. No problem was insoluble, no obstacle, she believed, could be irresistible. Therefore she smiled as Freeland came in treading more heavily than his wont. He stood and looked down at her.

'It's a bad business, kid,' he said, 'a bad, bad business.'

'Is it?'

'He has ruined your life. I feel like shooting him.'

'That wouldn't help me.'

'Can't you see how serious it is? You're neither married nor unmarried.'

'Can't I be just Clara Day?'

Freeland was rather taken aback. He was used to Julia's taking her cue from him. If a woman does not take the line proposed by the man in a situation, a scene, where is he? And, in fact, Freeland did not know where he was. His life had proceeded fairly smoothly from scene to scene and he was not used to being pulled up.

'No, no, kid,' he protested. 'It is too ghastly. Your position is impossible. Charles, damn him, can't protect you. The world is hard and cruel.... A man can play the lone hand, but I never heard of its being done by a woman: never.'

'I'm going to see Charles through,' said Clara, 'and you'll see how we shall make this old London of yours wake up.'

'But if there's a scandal....?'

'There shan't be.... And if there is: well ... well...'

Freeland in his turn began to weep. Clara seemed to him so pathetic, so innocent, so oblivious of all the hard facts of the world. She was like a wild bird, flying in ecstasy, flying higher and higher in the pain of her song. Indeed she was a most touching sight lying there in her innocence, full of faith, conscious of danger, busy with wary thoughts, but so eager, vital, and confident that all her belief in Charles and her love for him were based in the deeper and stronger forces of life.... She was roused to battle, and she was profoundly aware that the law and the other devices of society were contrived wholly to frustrate those deeper, stronger forces.... Freeland's sentimental sympathy seemed to her in her happy morning mood weak and irrelevant, yet charming and pathetic. He regarded her as a little girl and was entirely unconscious of all the passionate knowledge in her which moved so far and so swiftly beyond his capacity.

'Anything either of us can do,' he said, 'we shall do, always.' He stooped and took her in his arms and kissed her, and large tears fell upon her cheek. Tears came easily to these people: to Clara they came not. Indeed she rather exulted in her peril, which destroyed for her once and for all the superficiality of the life into which she had plunged in order to help Charles to conquer his kingdom, which was worlds away from this world of law and pretence, of spurious emotions and easy tears.

'I can't think how Charles could have done it,' said Freeland, drying his eyes.

'I made him,' said Clara, her eyes dancing with fun and mischief.

VI

BIRDS AND FISHES

For the time being it seemed that the superfluous Kitty had disappeared from the scene. She made no sign, and no attempt was made to trace her. Clara knew perfectly well that she was somewhere in the West End, but in that small crowded area it was possible to avoid meeting. People quickly fell into a groove and lived between a certain theatre, a certain restaurant, and home, and the light theatre was almost completely severed from the theatre which took itself so seriously. The legitimate stage had nothing to do with the bastard frivolity of the houses whose appeal was based on lingerie, pretty faces, and shapely limbs.

As for Charles, he was once again oblivious. He visited Clara at the flat, and had a painful scene with Freeland, who lashed out at him, rolled out a number of hard words, such as 'blackguard,' 'selfish beast,' etc., etc., but was nonplussed when Charles, not at all offended, said quietly,—

'Have you finished?'

'No. What do you propose to do about it? The poor child has no people. Julia and I are father and mother to her. In fact, I regard her as my adopted daughter.'

'I should always let her do exactly as she wished,' said Charles.

'Will you leave her alone then?'

'Certainly.'

Freeland regarded that as a triumph, but Clara was furious with him for interfering, and she scolded him until he promised that in future he would not say a word.

'What are you going to do?' he asked.

'I need a holiday from Charles,' she said—a new idea to Freeland, whose conception of love was besotted devotion—'and I am going to live alone for a time.'

Out she went, and before the day was done she had found a furnished apartment in the dingy region of narrow streets behind Leicester Square, and for a time she was entirely absorbed in this new acquisition. It was her own, her very own. It was at the top of the house, and looked out over roofs and chimneys westward so that she had the London sunset for comfort and companionship: more than enough, sweeter intimacy than any she had yet found among human beings, whose shallow business and fussy importance always hurt and exasperated her.... More clearly than ever she knew that there was only Charles and his work that mattered to her at all. She saw him occasionally and knew that he was entirely happy. He wrote to her every day and his plans were maturing famously. Lord Verschoyle was more and more interested, and as his lordship's interest grew so there waxed with it Charles's idea of his immense wealth. That worried Clara, who wanted her genius to prove himself in order to command and not to crave support. But Charles was elated with the success of his advertising campaign, and at the growth of his prestige among the artists.... 'Such a combination has never been known. We shall simply overwhelm the public.'

Clara's answer to this was to see that his relations with Sir Henry Butcher were not neglected. The explosion produced by Kitty's intervention had split their efforts, so that Charles was now working through Lord Verschoyle, she through Sir Henry Butcher, and once again she was embarked upon a battle with Charles for the realisation of his dreams—not upon paper, which perfectly satisfied him—but in terms of life in which alone she could feel that her existence was honourable. She kept a tight enough hold of Charles to see that he worked at The Tempest, but, as she was no longer with him continually, she could not check his delighted absorption in his committee. This was properly and duly constituted. It had a chairman, Professor Laverock, and Mr Clott acted also as its secretary in an honorary capacity, his emoluments from Charles being more than sufficient for his needs. It met regularly once a month in studios and drawing-rooms. The finest unofficialised brains in London were gathered together, and nervous men eyed each other suspiciously and anxiously until Charles appeared, with Mr Clott fussing and moving round him like a tug round a great liner. His presence vitalised the assembly; the suppressed idealism in his supporters came bubbling to the surface. Poets whose works were ignored by the great public, musicians whose compositions were ousted by Germans, Russians, Frenchmen, and Poles from the concert-rooms of London, dramatists whose plays were only produced on Sunday evenings, art critics who had acclaimed Charles's exhibition, all in his presence were conscious of a solidarity proof against all jealousy and disappointment; Charles, famous in Paris, Berlin, Moscow, New York, moved among them like a kindling wind.

He would arrive with his arms full of papers, while Mr Clott in a little black bag carried the essential documents—minute-book, agenda, suggestions, plans. For some months the Committee accomplished nothing but resolutions to invite and co-opt other members, but it seemed impossible to lure any really successful person into the net. No actor-manager, no Royal Academician, no poet with a healthy circulation could be found to give practical expression to his sympathy, though admiration for Mr Mann's work and the high reputation he had won for British Art on the Continent oozed from them all in letters of great length, which were read to the Committee until its members, most of them rather simple souls, were bewildered.

The accretion of Lord Verschoyle made a great difference. He attended in person, a shy, elegant young man, educated at Eton, and in the Guards for the gentle art of doing nothing. He owned a large area of London, and his estates were managed by a board which he was not even expected to attend, and he was a good young man. He wanted to spend money and to infuriate his trustees, but he did not know how to do it. Women bored him. He had a yacht, but loathed it, and kept it in harbour, and only spent on it enough money to keep it from rusting away. He maintained a stable, but would not bet or attend any other meeting than Ascot. He had some taste in art, but only cared for modern pictures, which he could buy for fifty or a hundred pounds. Indeed he was much too nice for his altogether exceptional opportunities for wasting money, for he loathed vulgarity, and the only people who could tell him how to waste his wealth—stable-touts, art-dealers, women of the West End—were essentially vulgar, and he could not endure their society.... He had five houses, but all he needed was an apartment of three rooms, and he was haunted and made miserable by the idea, not without a fairly solid foundation, that young women and their mammas wished to marry him for his money.... He longed to know a young woman who had no mamma, but none ever came his way. Society was full of mammas, and of ladies eager to push the fortunes of their husbands and lovers. He was turned to as a man of power, but in his heart he knew that no human being was ever more helpless, more miserably at the mercy of his trustees, agents, and servants.... He had been approached many times by persons interested in plays, theatres, and schemes, but being that rare and unhappy creature, a rich man with good taste, he had avoided them as hotly as the mammas of Mayfair and Belgravia.

He met Charles at his exhibition and was introduced to him. Charles at once bellowed at him at the top of his voice on the great things that would be achieved through the realisation of his dreams, and Lord Verschoyle had in his society the exhilarated sense of playing truant, and wanted more of it. He was hotly pursued at the moment by Lady Tremenheer, who had two daughters, and he longed ardently to disgrace himself, but so perfect was his taste that he could not do it—in the ordinary way. Charles was outrageous, but so famous as to carry it off, and Verschoyle seized upon the great artist as the way of escape, well knowing that art ranked with dissipation in the opinion of his trustees. With one stone he could kill all his birds. He promised by letter, being most careful to get his wicked indiscretion down in writing, his whole-hearted support of Charles's scheme.

Charles thereupon drew up his scheme. Verschoyle's wealth disposed of the most captious member of his committee, whose meetings now became more awful and ceremonious than ever. Even so much assembled intellect could not resist the wealth that through the generations had been gathered up to surround the gentle personality of Horace Biningham, Lord Verschoyle, who smiled benignantly upon the strange company and, all unconscious of the devastating effect upon them of his money, was most humbly flattered to be in the presence of so many distinguished persons.

The tenth meeting of the committee was arranged to be the most critical. Charles was to read and expound the scheme upon which he had been at work for years. The meeting was to be held at his own house, and for this occasion only he implored Clara to be present as hostess, and so eager was she to share in the triumph of that side of his activities that she consented and was the only woman present. With Professor Laverock in the chair, Mr Clott read the minutes of the last meeting, upon which, as nothing had happened, there was no comment. Clara sat in a corner by the door and looked from face to face, trying in vain to find in any something of the fire and eagerness that was in her Charles's, who, radiant and bubbling over with confidence, sat at a little table in the centre of the room with his papers in front of him, two enormous candles on either side, and his watch in his hand.

After formalities, Professor Laverock called upon Mr Mann to read his scheme to the committee.... Rarely can a room have contained so much eager idealism, rarely can so many mighty brains have been keyed up to take their tune from one.

Charles smoothed out his paper, shook back his hair, arranged the cuffs which he always wore in his desire to be taken for an English gentleman. His hearers settled themselves in their chairs. He began:—

'Gentlemen, we are all here concerned to make the theatre a temple of art, always open with a welcome to every talent, from that of the highest and most creative vision to that of the most humble and patient craftsman's life.'

'Ah!' some one sighed contentedly.

'We cannot expect such a theatre either from actors or from commercial persons who would be much better engaged in selling boots or soap.... In Germany art is honoured. Nietzsche, whom I acknowledge as my compeer, is to be commemorated with an enormous stadium upon a hill. In England we have turned away from the hill-top and are huddled together in the valleys until beauty is lost and dreams are but aching memories....'

Clara was irritated by this preamble. It was too much like the spirit of Sir Henry Butcher. If only Charles had consulted her she would have cut out this ambitious bombast, and brought him down to practical detail.

'My proposal is that we should erect upon one of three suitable sites in London a theatre which shall be at once a school and a palace of art. There will be one theatre on the German model, and an outdoor theatre on the plan of an arena in Sicily of which I have here sketches and plans.'

'Is that quite suitable in the English climate?' asked Adolph Griffenberg, a little Jewish painter.

'The disabilities of the English climate are greatly exaggerated,' said Charles. 'There could be protection from wind and rain, if it were thought necessary. There will be attached to the indoor theatre an experimental stage to which I of course shall devote most of my energies; then schoolrooms, a kitchen, a dining-room, a dancing-room, a music-room, a wardrobe, three lifts and two staircases.'

'Isn't this too detailed for our present purpose?' asked Griffenberg.

'I merely wish to show that I am entirely practical,' retorted Charles. 'There will be every modern appliance upon the stage, several inventions of my own, and an adjustable proscenium. The staff will consist of myself, a dozen instructors in the various arts of the theatre, and a larger number of pupils, who will be promoted as they give evidence of talent and skill in employing it.'

So far attention had been keen and eager. Charles's happy vision of a marble temple lit with the inward sun of vision and rosy with youth had carried all before it. He warmed to his task, talked on as the candles burned low, and at last came to the financial aspect of his proposal. Griffenberg leaned forward, and Clara watched him apprehensively.

'I have estimated the cost as follows,' said Charles, now confident that he had his hearers with him. 'I have put my estimate as low as possible, so that we may know our minimum:—

The Outdoor Theatre . . . . . . . . £6,000
The Indoor Theatre . . . . . . . . . £15,000
To Machinery . . . . . . . . . . . . £4,000
To Salaries . . . . . . . . . . . . £1,500
My Own Salary . . . . . . . . . . . £5,000
Wardrobe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . £600
Ground rent . . . . . . . . . . . . Nominal
Musicians and music . . . . . . . . £600
Paint, materials, etc. . . . . . . . £400
Food for the birds and fishes . . . £25

There was a dead silence. One or two men smiled. Others stared. Others pulled their noses or smoothed their hair. Griffenberg laughed harshly and said,—

'Excuse me, Mr Mann. I didn't quite catch that last item.'

Charles who was entirely unaware of the changed atmosphere looked up and repeated,—

'Food for the birds and fishes.... There must be beautiful birds flying in the outdoor theatre. In the courtyard there must be fish-ponds with rare fish....'

'We are not proposing to build a villa of Tiberius,' snapped Griffenberg, who was deeply wounded. 'I cannot agree to a scheme which includes birds and fishes.'

Clara was bristling with fury against Charles for being so childish, and against Griffenberg for taking advantage of him. She knew that Charles was in an ecstasy, and unable to cope with any practical point they chose to raise. It would have been fair for Griffenberg to take exception to his estimates, but not to the birds and fishes.... Her sense of justice was so outraged that to keep herself from intervening she slipped out of the room and gave vent to her fury in the darkness of the passage.

The worst happened. The scheme was forgotten; the birds and fishes were remembered.... Griffenberg asked rather insolently if Mr Mann proposed to publish the scheme as it stood, and Charles, who did not detect the insolence, said that he certainly intended to publish the scheme and had indeed already sent a copy to the Press Association.

'As your own or as the Committee's scheme?'

Mr Clott intervened,—

'I made it quite clear that the scheme was Mr Mann's own, and Mr Mann sent with it what I may say is a very beautiful description of his theatre as it will be in being.'

'Theatres in the air,' said some one, and all, just a little ashamed, though with a certain bravado of geniality to cover their shame, rose to go.

As they came out of the room Clara darted up the stairs and heard their remarks as they departed. 'Birds and fishes.' ... 'Extraordinary man.' ... 'Fairy tale.' ... 'Damned impudence.'

Charles, still unmindful of any change, moved among them thanking them warmly for their support and explaining that if he had been somewhat long in reading it was because he had wished to leave no room for misunderstanding.

No one stayed but an Irish poet, who had been delighted with the words, birds and fishes, emerging like a poem from the welter of so much detail, and Verschoyle, a little uneasy, but entranced by Charles's voice and what seemed to him his superb audacity. They three stood and talked themselves into oblivion of the world and its narrow ways, and Charles was soon riding the hobby-horse of his theory of Kingship and urging Verschoyle to interest the Court of St James's in Art.

Clara joined them, listened for a while, and later detached his lordship from the other two, who talked hard against each other, neither listening, both hammering home points. She took Verschoyle into a corner and said,—

'It was very unfair of Mr Griffenberg to catch Charles out on the birds and fishes. They're very important to him.'

'That's what I like about him,' said Verschoyle. 'Things are important to him. Nothing is important to the rest of us.'

'Some of them will resign from the committee,' said Clara. 'I hope you won't. It is a great pity, because Charles does mean it so thoroughly.'

Verschoyle screwed in his eye-glass and held his knee and rocked it to and fro. He was shrewd enough to see that if he resigned the whole committee would break up, and he knew that this dreadful eventuality was in Clara's mind also. He liked Charles's extravagance: it made him feel wicked, but also he was kind and could not bring himself to hurt Clara. He had never in his life felt that he was of the slightest importance to any one. Clara felt that sense stirring in him and she fed it; let him into the story of their struggles and the efforts she had made to bring her idealist to London, and urged upon him the vital importance of Charles's work.

'They're all jealous of him,' she said, 'all these people who have never been heard of outside London. It was just like them to fasten on a thing like that.'

Verschoyle laughed.

'I like the idea of birds and fishes in London,' he said. 'I think we need them.... Now, if it were you, Mrs Mann'—for he had been so introduced to her—'I would back you through everything.'

'It is me,' said Clara. 'It always is a woman. If it were not for me we should not be in London now.'

'You must bring him to dinner with me.'

Clara accepted in her eagerness to save the situation without realising that she had compromised herself.

'You will forgive my saying it,' added Verschoyle, 'but it hurts me to hear you speak of yourself as a woman. You are only a child and I hate women.'

'So do I,' said Clara, all her anxiety now allayed. With Verschoyle for her friend she did not care how soon the committee was dissolved. She had always hated the committee, for, as her grandfather used to say, a committee is a device by which the incompetent check the activities of the competent.... She liked Verschoyle. He was a lonely little man and she thought whimsically that only lonely people could swallow the birds and fishes which are so necessary as the finishing touch to the artist's vision.

'I must be going now,' she said to her companion's surprise.

'Can't I take you in my car?' he asked, concealing his astonishment at her speaking of a home elsewhere. She consented, and he took her back to her rooms, leaving Charles and the Irish poet still rhapsodising in a somewhat discordant duet.

VII

SUPPER

Idealists must certainly be added to the drunkards and children over whom a specially benign deity watches: a flood of disaster by sea and land gave a plentiful crop of news and made it impossible for the papers to publish Charles Mann's scheme. His committee's dread of being made publicly ridiculous evaporated, and, as Lord Verschoyle did not resign, no other member did, and Griffenberg simply sent in a letter of protest and announced that he was too busy to take any more active part in the proceedings. He went away and denounced the theatre as a vulgar institution, which no artist could enter without losing his soul. He said this publicly in a newspaper and produced one of those delightful controversies which in the once happy days of unlimited advertisement provided an opportunity for mutual recrimination upon an impersonal basis.

Verschoyle promised Charles thirty thousand pounds if he could raise another similar amount, and Charles regarded himself as worth thirty thousand already, raised Mr Clott's salary, and condescended with so much security to begin really to work at The Tempest.

Clara, who was still playing small parts at the Imperium, found to her dismay that Sir Henry had rather cooled towards the Mann production and was talking of other plays, a huge American success called The Great Beyond, and a French drama of which he had acquired the rights some few years previously. This was really alarming, for she knew that if she could not engage Charles speedily he would simply fling away from the theatre and devote himself, unsupported except by Verschoyle, who was by no means a certain quantity, to his airy schemes. Already he was beginning to be swayed by letters from well-meaning persons in the provinces, who urged him to found another Bayreuth in the Welsh Hills or the Forest of Arden.... Give Charles a hint and he would construct an imaginary universe! If she could only stop him advertising, he would not be exposed to the distracting bombardment of hints and suggestions which was opened upon him with every post, especially after he announced with his usual bland indiscretion his association with the owner of a fashionable part of the Metropolis.

Verschoyle did not object. It horrified his trustees and after a time, growing bolder, he was much in Charles's company, and found him extremely useful as a bogey to frighten away the mammas who had made his life hideous ever since his Eton days, when one of his aunts had horrified him by referring to one of his cousins, a child of fifteen, as his 'dear little wifie.' ... Further, by seeing much of Charles, he could see more of Clara without compromising her or himself.

Now in the world of the theatre there never is but always may be money. It is always going to be made, so that everybody associated with it has credit sustained by occasional payment. Clara realised this very early in her career. She understood finance, because her grandfather had discussed his affairs with her exactly as if she were his partner, and she had had to keep a tight hand on his extravagance; and she quickly understood that in the theatre money must be spent always a little faster than it can be made to keep the current of credit flowing. She also realised that Sir Henry Butcher spent it a great deal faster, and was cool and warm towards the various projects laid before him according as they made payment possible.... He had watched Charles Mann's increase of fame with a jealous interest, but with a shrewdly expert eye waited for the moment of capitalisation to come before he committed himself to the new-fangled ways of dressing the stage, these damned Greek tragedies, plays in curtains, German toy sets, and Russian flummery in which painted blobs stood for trees and clouds. To Sir Henry a tree was a tree, a cloud a cloud, and he liked nothing better than to have real rabbits on the stage, if possible to out-Nature Nature.... At the same time he knew that the public was changing. It was becoming increasingly difficult to produce an instantaneous success. The theatre did not stand where it had done in popular esteem, and its personalities had no longer the vivid authority they had once enjoyed. When the Prime Minister visited the Imperium, it was rather Sir Henry than the Prime Minister who was honoured: a sad declension, for Prime Ministers come and go, but a great actor rules for ever as sole lessee and manager of an institution as familiar to the general mind as the House of Commons. Prime Ministers had come and gone, they had in turn accepted Sir Henry's kind offer of a box for the first night, but latterly Prime Ministers had gathered popularity and actor-managers had lost it, so great had been the deterioration of the public mind since the introduction of cheap newspapers, imposing upon every public character the necessity of a considerable waste of energy in advertising.... In the old days, a great man's advertising was done for him in acknowledgment of his greatness. Sir Henry was uneasy, could not shake off the gathering gloom, and a deep-seated conviction that Lady Butcher had made the fatal mistake of his career by devoting herself so exclusively to the front of the house and social drapery, bringing him into intimate contact with such persons as Prime Ministers, Dukes, and Attorney-Generals.... The public had been admitted behind the scenes. The mystery was gone. The theatre, even the Imperium had lost its spell. Nothing in it was sacred; not even rehearsals, which were continually interrupted by journalists, male and female, elegant young men and women who were friends and acquaintances of his family, dressmakers. 'Ah! Teresa! Teresa!' sighed Sir Henry, gazing at the portrait of that lady. 'It needs your touch, your charm, the quick insight into the health of the theatre which only comes to those who have been born in it.'

Soon the Imperium would close for a short holiday, after a shockingly bad season, and its manager had to make up his mind as to his new production. Mr Gillies was all for safety and economy, and for postponing any adventure to the Spring, but Sir Henry said,—

'The fate of the whole year is decided in October. The few people who matter come back from Karlsbad and Scotland cleaned up and scraped, and it is then that you make your impression. The Spring is too late. We must have something new.'

'We've got nothing new.'

'This fellow Mann.'

'But! He's mad. If he walked into the Club half the men would walk out of it.'

'He has made himself felt.'

'Yes. But in the wrong way.'

'The wrong way is often the right way in the end.'

'You can't have him in the theatre, Chief, after the way he has talked about us, as though none of us knew our business.'

'He might say so if he saw our balance-sheet,' said Sir Henry, who loved nothing so much as teasing his loyal subordinates. 'We've nothing but this melodrama of Halford Bunn's in which I should have to play the Pope.'

'Well, you were a great success as a Cardinal, Chief.'

'Hm! Hm! Yes.' Sir Henry began to live again through the success of The Cardinal's Niece, but also he remembered the horrible time he had had at rehearsals with Mr Halford Bunn who would get so drunk with his own words that any acting which distracted attention from them drove him almost into hysterics.

Sir Henry laughed.

'Bunn or Mann.... Said Mr Mann to Mr Bunn, "I hope you've got a record run." Said Mr Bunn to Mr Mann, "You, sir, are but an also ran."'

'Ha! ha! ha!' laughed the manager.

'He! he! he!' laughed Sir Henry, and they parted without having solved their problem, though the impishness in Sir Henry made him long to infuriate both Bunn and Mann by a merger of his contracts with the two of them.... Oh! dear. Oh, dear, authors had always been trial enough, but if artists were going to begin to thrust their inflated egoism into the machinery of the theatre then the life of its manager would become unbearable.... Sir Henry liked to drift and to make sudden and surprising decisions.

In this case the decision was made for him—by Clara. It had become one of his chief pleasures to give her lunch in the Aquarium, as she called it, and to laugh with her over her vivid and comic impressions of London, and insensibly he had fallen in love with her, not as was his habit theatrically and superficially, but with an old man's passion for youth. It hurt him, plagued him, tortured him, because she never gave him an opening for flirtation, but kept his wits at full stretch and made him feel thirty again: and as he felt thirty he wanted to be thirty.... She never discussed her private affairs with him, but he knew that she lived alone. She baffled him, bewildered him, until he was often hard put to it not to burst into tears. So quick she was and she understood so well, had so keen an insight into character and the intrigue that went on all around her, that he marvelled at her innocence and sometimes almost hated her for it, and for her refusal to accept the position assigned to women in society. His blague, his bluff were useless with her. He had painfully to reveal to her his best, the kindly, tender-hearted, generous simpleton that at heart he was. Loving her, he could not help himself, and, loving her, he raged against her.

She would never allow him to visit her in her rooms. That was a privilege which she reserved for Verschoyle. Her rooms were her sanctuary, her refuge, the place where she could be simple and human, and be the untouched Clara Day who had lived in childish glee with her grandfather and most powerfully alone in her imagination with various characters, more real than any of the persons with whom she ever came in contact until she met Charles Mann.... He was never admitted to her rooms, nor was Sir Henry Butcher, in whom she had for the first time encountered the ordinary love of the ordinary sentimental male. This left her so unmoved that she detested it, with all its ridiculous parade of emotions, its stealthy overtures, its corrosive dishonesty, which made a frank interchange of thought and feeling impossible.... The thing had happened to her before, but she had been too young to realise it, or to understand to the full its essential possessiveness, which to her spirit was its chief offence.

She had to rebuke Sir Henry. One week she found her salary trebled. She returned the extra ten pounds to Mr Gillies, the manager, pointing out that she was doing the same work, small and unimportant, and that it was not fair to the other girls.

'The Chief believes in you, Miss Day. He doesn't want you to leave us.'

'This is the very kind of thing to drive me out.'

'You're not like other girls, Miss Day....' said Mr Gillies. 'Indeed, I often wonder what a young lady who wears her clothes as you do is doing in the theatre.'

Clara's expression silenced him, and she was enraged with the Chief for exposing her to such familiarity. She taxed Sir Henry with it, and he was quick to see his mistake, and so warmly pleaded that he had only meant it as a kindness that she could not but forgive him. He implored her to let him merit her forgiveness by making her a present of anything she desired; but she desired nothing.

'I'm at your feet,' he said, and he went down on his knees. 'In two or three years I will make a great actress of you. You shall be the great woman of your time.... A Spring day in the country with you would make me young as Romeo....'

'Please get up,' said Clara, 'and let us talk business. You promised early this year that you would do Charles Mann's Tempest.'

'Yes. I'm always making promises. One lives on promises. Life is a promise.... If I promise to do The Tempest will you come and stay with us in The Lakes in August? I want you to meet the Bracebridges; you ought to know the best people, the gay people, the aristocrats, the only people who know how to be amusing.'

This was getting further and further away from business, though Clara knew that it was impossible to keep Sir Henry to the point. She ignored his invitation and replied,—

'If you will do The Tempest I can get Lord Verschoyle to support it.'

Sir Henry was at once jealous. He pouted like a baby.

'I don't want Verschoyle or any other young cub to help you. I want to help you.... Verschoyle can't appreciate you. He can't possibly see you as you are, or as you are going to be.'

Clara smiled. Verschoyle had become her best friend, and with him she enjoyed a deep, quiet intimacy which the young gentleman preserved with exquisite tact and taste, delighting in it as he did in a work of art, or a good book, and appreciating fully that the girl's capacity for it was her rarest and most irresistible power.... Sir Henry was like a silly boy in his desire to impress on her that he alone could understand her.

He continued,—

'It seems so unnatural that you have no women friends other than old Julia.... An actress nowadays has her part to play in society.... You have brought new life into my theatre.'

'Then,' said Clara, 'let us do The Tempest.'

'But I don't want to do The Tempest.'

'Charles said you did.'

'We talked about it, but we are always talking in the theatre.... I would give up everything if you would only be a little kinder to me.'

Was this the great Sir Henry speaking? Clara saw that he was on the verge of a schoolboy outburst, perhaps a declaration, and she was never fonder of the man than in this moment of self-humiliation. He waited for some relaxation in her, but was met only with sallies. He rose, drew his hand over his eyes, and walked up and down the room sighing.

'At my age, to love for the first time.... It is appalling: it is tragic. To have made so great a position and to have nothing to offer you that you will accept.'

'Not even a rise in salary,' said Clara, a little maliciously, and she so hurt him that he collapsed in his attempt at heroics, and to win her at all costs said,—

'Yes, yes. I will do The Tempest. I can make Prospero a great part. I will do The Tempest if you will be Miranda; at least if you will be nothing else you shall be a daughter to me.'

'You had better ask Charles and Verschoyle to supper,' said Clara. 'And we can all talk it over. But I won't have Mr Gillies.'

'Ah! How Teresa hated that man.... Do you know that I sometimes think he has undone all the great work she did for me.'

Clara had no mind to discuss Mr Gillies. She had gained her point. She felt certain that a combination of Butcher, Charles, and Verschoyle was the most promising for her purpose.

'I hate Mann,' said Sir Henry. 'I hate him. He is a renegade. He loathes his own calling. He has turned his back on it....'

'When you know him you will love him.'

Sir Henry swung round and fixed his eyes on her.

'I live in dread,' he said, 'in dread for you. You have everything before you, everything, and then one day you will fall in love and your genius will be laid at the feet of some fool who will trample it under foot as a cow treads on a beautiful buttercup.'

Clara smiled. Sir Henry, from excessive familiarity with noble words, could never find the exact phrase.

The supper was arranged in the aquarium, which in Clara's honour was filled with banked up flowers, lilies, roses, delphiniums, and Canterbury bells.... Clara wore gray and green, and gray shoes with cross-straps about her exquisite ankles. She came with Verschoyle, who brought her in his car which he had placed at her disposal. Sir Henry was in a velvet evening suit of snuff colour, and he glared jealously at his lordship whom he regarded as an intending destroyer of Clara's reputation.

'I'm glad you're going to give Mann his chance,' said Verschoyle. 'Extraordinary fellow, most extraordinary.... Pity his life should be wasted, especially now that we are beginning to wake up to the importance of the theatre.'

Sir Henry winced.

'There are men,' he said, 'who have worked while others talked. Take this man Shaw, for instance. He talked for years. Then he comes out with plays which are all talk.'

'Ibsen,' said Verschoyle.

'Why should we on the English stage go on gloomily saying that there's something rotten in the state of Norway?.... I have run Shakespeare for more hundred nights than any man in the history of the British drama, and I venture to say that every man of eminence and every woman of beauty or charm has had at least a cigarette in this room.... Isn't that proof of the importance of the theatre?'

'It may be only proof of your personal charm, Sir Henry,' said Verschoyle, and Clara was pleased with him for that.... She enjoyed this meeting of her two friends. Verschoyle's breeding was the exactly appropriate set off to Sir Henry's flamboyance.

With the arrival of Charles, the grouping was perfect. He came in bubbling over with enthusiasm. His portfolio was under his arm, and he had in his hand a bundle of newspapers.

'Extraordinary news,' he said. 'The Germans in despair are turning the theatre into a circus. Their idea of a modern Hellenic revival. Crowds, horses, clowns.... Sophocles in a circus!'

'Horrible!' said Verschoyle. 'Horrible! We must do better than that, Sir Henry.'

'I have done better.'

Charles bent over Clara's hand and kissed it.

'I have been working hard,' he said. 'Very hard. My designs are nearly finished.... Verschoyle likes them.'

'I think them delightful,' said Verschoyle.

Supper was served. In tribute to Clara's charm, Verschoyle's wealth, and Charles's genius, it was exquisitely chosen—oysters, cold salmon, various meats, pastries and jellies, with sherry, champagne, port and liqueurs, ices and coffee.

Sir Henry and Charles ate enormously. Even in that they were in competition. They sat opposite each other, and their hands were constantly busy reaching over the table for condiments, bread, biscuits, olives, wine.... Verschoyle and Clara were in strong contrast to them, though both were enjoying themselves and were vastly entertained by the gusto of the great.

Sir Henry talked at Clara in a boyish attempt to dispossess Charles. He was at his most airily brilliant, and invented a preposterous story in which Mr Gillies, his manager, and Mr Weinberg, his musical director, were engaged in an intrigue to ruin Miss Julia Wainwright, as the one had a niece, the other a wife, aching to become leading lady at the Imperium.

'Julia,' he said, 'shall play Caliban. Why not? You shall play Ariel, Mann, and dear old Freeland shall be Ceres.... Let us be original. I haven't read The Tempest for a long time, but I dare say there's a part for you, Verschoyle.'

'No, thanks.'

'You could be one of the invisible spirits who eat the phantom supper.'

'You and Charles could do that very well,' said Clara, who felt that her plans would succeed. These three men were held together by her personality, and she meant them to unite for the purpose of forcing out those qualities in Charles which made her ready for every sacrifice, if only they could be brought to play their part in the life of his time.... As the wine and food took effect, all three men were in high spirits, and soon were roaring with laughter at the immense joke in which they all shared, the joke of pleasing the British public.

'It is the most wonderful game ever invented,' said Sir Henry. 'Millions and millions of people believing everything they are told. Shouting Hurrah! for fried fish if the hero of the moment says fried fish, and Hooray! for ice-cream when the next hero says ice-cream.... I tell you I could put on a play by Halford Bunn to-morrow, and persuade them for a few weeks that it was better than Shakespeare. Ah! you blame us for that, but the public is at fault always. The man who makes a fortune is the man who invents a new way of boring them.... We shall be like the French soon, where the only means of maintaining any interest in politics is by a scandal now and then.'

As they talked Clara felt more and more remote from them, and at moments found it difficult to believe that it was really she to whom all these amazing things had happened. She thought it must be the end. Here at one table were money, imagination, and showmanship, the three essentials of success, but the three men in whom they lived were talking themselves into ineffectiveness. Even Verschoyle had caught the fever and was talking, and she found herself thinking that the three of them, whom separately she could handle so well, were together too much for her.

They talked for hours, and she tried again and again vainly to steer them back to business. They would have none of it. Their tongues were loosed and they expressed their several discontents in malicious wit.

At last she left the table and took up Charles's portfolio. He sprang to his feet and snatched it away from her rather roughly and said,—

'I don't want to show them yet.'

'It is getting late, Charles,' she protested.

'In Moscow,' he said, 'a feast like this goes on for days.'

Sir Henry took advantage of the altercation to ascertain from Verschoyle that he was willing to back Mann's Tempest for at least an eight weeks' run. That was good enough for Sir Henry. He had no need to look at the drawings.... He was back again in his palmy days. He knew that Clara, like Teresa, would not let him make a fool of himself.

Clara saw this, and was very angry and sore. It was terrible to her that when she had hoped for an eagerness and gusto to carry through her project there should have been this declension upon money and food. After all, Shakespeare wrote The Tempest and his share in its production was greater than that of either Mann or Butcher. She had hoped they would discuss the play and bring into common stock their ideas upon it.

However, she laughed at herself for being so young and innocent. No doubt in their own time they would really tackle their problem, and, after all, in the world of men, from which women were and perhaps always would be excluded, money and food were of prime importance. All the same she was disappointed and could hardly conceal it.

'I haven't had such a good evening for twenty years,' said Sir Henry.

'Famous,' said Charles, returning to the table. Charles was astonished to find how much he liked Sir Henry, upon whose doings in his exile he had brooded bitterly.

Verschoyle said,—

'I'm only astonished that more men in my position don't go in for the theatre. There are so many of us and we can't think of anything better than racing and polo and big game.'

As they were all so pleased with themselves, Clara swallowed her chagrin, and more happily accepted their homage when Sir Henry toasted her as the presiding Muse of the Imperium.

She was suffering from the reaction from a fulfilled ambition. She had overcome Charles's reluctance to submit to the machinery of the theatre, and was herself now inspired with something of a horror of its immense power, which could absorb originality and force, and reduce individuals to helpless puppets. But she would not admit to herself that she might have been wrong, and that it were possibly better to have left Charles to fight his own way through.

No, no. Left to himself he would always be tripped up by his desire for birds and fishes and other such superfluities. Left to meet in their love of art he and Sir Henry would soon have been at loggerheads. In their love of food, they could discover each other's charm and forget their jealousy and suspicion of each other's aims.

VIII

SOLITUDE

Verschoyle swept aside her reluctance to accept gifts from him, and she allowed him to furnish her rooms for her upon condition that he never came there without her permission. He said,—

'Why shouldn't I have the pleasure of indulging my desire to give you everything in the world? People will talk! ... People talk anyhow in London. If we were seen walking together down Piccadilly, there would be talk. They will say I am going to marry you, but we know different.... Your way of living is exactly my ideal, absolute independence, peace, and privacy. We're rather alike in that. It seems so odd that we should be living with these people whose whole aim in life is publicity.'

They had many happy hours together reading and discussing the books which he bought for her by the armful at a shop in Charing Cross Road, where, open to the street, were piles of books almost blatantly subversive of society—Nietsche, Havelock Ellis, Shaw, Ibsen, Anarchist tracts, Socialist and Labour journals, R.P.A. cheap reprints, every sort and kind of book that in an ordinary shop would only be procured upon a special order.... It was a very fierce shop. Its woodwork was painted scarlet, and above the shelves in gilt letters were such names as Morris, Marx, Bakounin, Kropotkin, Lassalle, and mottoes such as 'The workers of the world have nothing to lose but their chains.'

It was Clara who discovered the shop in her wanderings through the West End, which she desired to know even to its remotest crannies, and its oddity seized her imagination when she discovered that for all its fierceness it was kept by a gentle little old Scotsman, who most ferociously desired the destruction of society, but most gently helped all who needed help and most wholly sympathised with all, and they were many, who turned to him for sympathy.... The frequenters of his shop were poor, mostly long-haired eaters of nuts, and drinkers of ideas. There were young men who hovered in the background of his shop arguing, chatting, filling in the time they had to spend away from their lodgings in the frequent intervals between their attempts to do work for which their convictions made them unfitted. They believed, as he did, in the nobility of work, but could find none that was not ignoble. It was his boast that he had no book in his shop in which he did not believe.

The beautiful and elegant young lady who walked into his shop one day astonished and delighted him with her radiance. She was the kind of accident that does not often happen to a humble Anarchist bookseller.

When she came again and again, he warmed to her, and recommended books, and gave her Prince Kropotkin's Memoirs as a present, at least he gave her the second volume, for he could not find the first.... He always hotly denied that books were stolen from his open shop, but admitted that they were sometimes 'borrowed' by his young friends.

The story of Kropotkin's escape from the fortress moved Clara deeply, and she read it to Verschoyle in her rooms.

'And that man is still alive,' she said, 'here in England, where we go round and round hunting fame and money.... He was like you, Verschoyle, in just such a position as you, but he found it intolerable and went to prison.'

'Ah! but that was in Russia, where it is easy to go to prison. If I tried and tried they wouldn't send me. I'm too rich. They wouldn't do it. If I became an Anarchist, they would just laugh because they don't believe that society can ever be upset.'

'I'm quite sure I didn't go into that shop for nothing. Something is going to happen to me,' said Clara.

'I think quite enough has happened to you. Don't you? ... What a restless little creature you are! Here you are with everything at your feet, the greatest artist, the richest bachelor in London at your disposal, and you want something to happen to you.'

'I don't want it. I say that I feel it must come.

'You're before your time, my dear. That's what is the matter with you. Women aren't independent yet. They are still clinging to men. That is what I cannot stand about them. I should hate to have a woman clinging to my money. Still more should I hate to have one clinging to myself.'

'But you ought to marry. You would be happier.'

He shook his head and smiled,—

'You have made that impossible, Clara.'

'I?'

'Yes. If I found a girl like you who wanted to marry me I might consider it.... My aunts are furious.'

'With me?'

'Yes. You have made more of a stir than you can imagine. They tell me you are more wicked than Cleopatra, and yet you complain that nothing happens to you.'

She took him to the bookshop and introduced him to the bookseller, a little gray-bearded man in a tweed suit. Verschoyle liked him and asked him what he thought a man in his position ought to do.

'The man Jesus put you right years ago,' said the bookseller. 'Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor.'

'But I can't,' said Verschoyle. 'I'm only a cestui que trust.'

To both Verschoyle and Clara the bookshop was a place of escape, a holiday ground where they could play with ideas which to Verschoyle were a new kind of toy. With Mann there was always a certain strain for him, because Mann wanted something definite; but with the bookseller and his young friends, he was at his ease, for they were very like himself, without ambition, and outside all the press and hurry of society. Like himself they wanted nothing except to be amused, and like himself they hated amusement which entailed effort.

Clara, however, as usual took it seriously. The Kropotkin Memoirs had jolted her imagination, and she saw the young men of the bookshop as potential Kropotkins, people who stood upon the edge of an abyss of suffering and asked nothing better than to be engulfed in the world's misery.

The disturbance in her serenity was so great that for some weeks she shut herself up alone to collect her ideas. The world was not so simple as she had thought; certainly by no means so simple as it had appeared during her three years with Charles. As she had said, London was different. She had progressed so far with this great London of Butcher and Verschoyle only to find through the bookshop another London suddenly opened up before her—the London of the poor.... Poverty she had never known, except the poverty of the world of art which is created rather by indifference to money than by the grim lack of it. With Charles days had been so busy, nights so happy, that it was a small thing that every now and then she had to go hungry for a day in order that he might not lack. The immense poverty which now she saw everywhere in this West End of London, in courts off Charing Cross Road, in vast workmen's dwellings, in Soho, and by her own rooms at the back of Leicester Square, everywhere round the calculated magnificence of the theatres, overwhelmed her and changed many of her conceptions; first of all her attitude towards Kitty Messenger, whom she had regarded as a vulgar nuisance, a horrible intrusion from the past. It was impossible for her to accept her position of security above the dirty sea of poverty.

She loathed the poor, their indolence, their coarseness, their horrible manners, their loud mirth and violent anger.... Once outside her door two drunken women fought. They leaned against the wall, clutching each other by the hair, and attempted, while they breathed thick curses into each other's glaring faces, to bite, to scratch, each to bang the other's head against the wall.... Clara ran past them trembling in every limb. She had never seen the uncontrolled brutality of which human beings are capable.... But it was even worse when a policeman arrested the two women and roughly dragged them away.

And after that she was continually coming upon similar scenes, or upon degraded and derelict types. It was as though she had been blind and was suddenly able to see—or had the world turned evil?

How could Verschoyle, how could Charles, how could all the well-dressed and well-fed people be so happy while such things were going on before their eyes? Perhaps, like herself, they could not see them. It was very strange.

Stranger still was the release of energy in herself, bringing with it a new personal interest in her own life. She began to look more keenly at other women and to understand them a little better, to sympathise even with their vanity, their mindlessness, their insistence upon homage and flattery from their men. From that she passed to a somewhat bewildered introspection, realising that it was extraordinary that she should have been able to sever her connection with Charles and to maintain the impersonal when the personal relationship was suspended—or gone? Yes. That was quite extraordinary, and because of it she knew that she could never live the ordinary woman's life, absorbed entirely in external things, in position, clothes, food and household, shops.

She remembered Charles saying that his feeling for her was at the farthest end of love, and certainly she had never known anything like the relationship between, say, Freeland and Julia—easy, comfortable romance. To be either easy or comfortable had become an abomination to her, and at bottom this was the reason for her dissatisfaction. It had been too easy to procure the beginnings of success for Charles. They had secured control of the machinery of the theatre, and must now act in accordance with its grinding.

For some weeks she was paralysed and could do nothing but sit and brood; hardly thinking at all consciously, but gazing in upon herself and the forces stirring in her, creeping up and up to take control of her imagination that had hitherto been entirely free and in undisputed mastery of her being. This was a time of the acutest agony. She would not surrender. Without knowing what was being demanded of her she cried, 'I will not, I will not.' But the forces stirring in her were implacable, and changed her whole physical sensation of being. Her body changed, her figure altered most subtly and imperceptibly, her face gained in strength and beauty, but she loathed the change, because it was taking place without reference to her own will, or her own imagination, which for the first time in her life was baffled.... It was appalling to her, who had always found it so easy to direct the lives of others, to find her own life slipping with a terrible velocity out of control.... No thought, no notion of her recent days was now valid. At the very worst stage of all even simple movements seemed incomprehensible. When she caught sight of her own lovely arm that had always given her a thrill of pleasure, it now repelled her as something fantastic and irresistibly comic, revoltingly comic at this time when she was a prey to so much obscure suffering, so deep that she could trace it to no cause, so acute that she could discern in it no purpose.

She found it almost her sole relief to read, and she devoured among other curious works which she found at her bookshop, General Booth's Darkest London and Rose's The Truth about the Transvaal. Novels she could not read at all. Fiction was all very well, but it ought to have some relation to human emotions as they are. After her aerial life in Charles's imagination she needed a diet of hard facts, and, as usual, what she needed that she obtained. Both Booth and Rose dealt with the past, but that made them the more palatable, and they reassured her. The facts she was now discovering had been present to other minds and her own had not unsupported to bear the whole weight of them.... In her untouched youth she had always accepted responsibility for the whole universe, and so long as her life had been made easy, first of all by her grandfather, and then by Charles, the burden had been tolerable, and she had been able to mould the universe to make them comfortable. But now that life was suddenly for no apparent reason incredibly difficult, the burden was greater than she could bear, and it relieved her to find in these two books the utterance of suffering consciences..... As she read Rose she remembered a saying of her grandfather's, 'The British make slums wherever they go because in every British mind there is a slum.'

She could find relief in the books, but she could not stay the welling up of the mysterious forces which swamped the clarity of her mind and made her usually swift intuition sluggish.

Very thankful was she that she had steered Charles into the Imperium before this cataclysm broke in her.... She could well be alone to sort out if possible the surfeit of new impressions from which she was suffering. She no longer had thoughts but only obsessions. London.... London.... London.... The roaring traffic: the crowds of people: Coventry Street by night: the illuminated theatres: the statue in Piccadilly Circus: the hotel in which she and Charles had stayed on their first night in London: the painted faces of the women: policemen: commissionaires: wonderful cars lit up at night, gliding through the streets with elegant ladies in evening dress reclining at their ease, bored, mechanical, as hard and mechanical as the cars that carried them through the streets: the drunken women fighting outside her door: the woman opposite her windows who kept a canary in a cage and watered so lovingly the aspidistra on her window-sill: tubes: lifts: glaring lights and white tiles.... London.... London.... London....

Through it all there ran a thread of struggling, conscious purpose which kept her from misery and made it impossible for her to succumb. Deep in her heart she knew that she could not; that she had escaped; that it would never be for her an awful, a terrible, an overwhelming thing to be a woman.

With that knowledge there came an exultation, a pride, a triumphant sense of having come through an almost fatal peril, the full nature of which had yet to be revealed. And she had wrestled through it alone. Her childish detestation of her womanhood was gone. She accepted it, gloried in it as her instrument and knew that she would never be lost in it.

For ever in her mind that crisis was associated with Kropotkin's escape from prison, and she was full of a delighted gratitude to the little bookseller who had lent her the book, the second volume, the first having been borrowed.

Immeasurably increased was her understanding through this sudden convulsion of her life, and she was very proud of the loyalty to her instinct which had made her wrestle through it alone; and now, when she saw women absorbed in external things, she knew that they had taken refuge in them from just such convulsions in which, had they attempted to face them, they must have been swamped. They clung to external things to prevent themselves being lost in the whirlpool of the internal world of womanhood.... Ah! It was supreme to be a woman, to contain the most fierce and most powerful of all life's manifestations, to smile and to distil all these violent forces into charm, to suffer and to turn all suffering into visible beauty.

If Clara now had any easy pity it was for men, who live always in fantasy, lured on by their own imaginings in the vain effort to solve the mystery of which only a true and loyal woman has the key.

When once more she approached her external life it was through the bookshop, where she found her friend the bookseller munching his lunch of wheaten biscuits and apples in the dingy little room at the back of his shop.

He offered her an apple. She took it and sat on a pile of books tied up with a rope.

'You're looking bonny,' he said.

'I think I'll come and be your assistant.'

'A fine young leddy like you?'

'I might meet some one like Kropotkin.'

'Ah! Isn't that grand? There's none o' your Dumas and Stevensons can beat that; a real happening in our own life-time.... But I can no afford an assistant.'

'Oh! You always seem to have plenty of people in your shop.'

'These damned publishers put their prices up and up on the poor bookseller, and my brains are all my capital, and I will not sell the stuff that's turned out like bars o' soap, though the authors may be as famous as old Nick and the publishers may roll by in their cars and build their castles in the countryside.... I sell my books all the week, and I grow my own food on my own plot on Sundays, and I'll win through till I'm laid in the earth, and have a pile o' books to keep me down when I'm dead as they have done in my lifetime.'

He thrust a slice of apple into his mouth and munched away at it, rosy defiance of an ill-ordered world shining from his healthy cheeks.

On his desk Clara saw his account book, a pile of bills, and old cheques, and it was not difficult to guess the cause of his trouble.

'I'm sure I should sell your books for you.'

'You'd draw all London into my shop, young leddy, as you'll draw them to the playhouse; but bookselling is a dusty trade and is not for fair wits or fine persons.'

Clara looked out into the shop, and was happy in its friendliness. A lean, hungry-looking man came in, bought a paper, and stayed turning over the books. She could not see his face, but something in his movement told of quality of wit and precise consciousness. He seized a book with a familiar mastery, as though he could savour and weigh its contents through his finger-tips, glanced through it, and put it away as though it were finally disposed of. There was a concentrated absorption in everything he did that made it definite and final. He was so sensitive that at the approach of another person he edged away as though to avoid a distasteful impact.... Very shabby he was, but distinguished and original. After taking up half a dozen books and not finding in them any attraction, he stopped, pondered, and moved out of the shop quite obviously having clearly in his mind some necessary and inevitable purpose.

His going was a wrench to Clara, so wholly had she been absorbed in him; but though she longed to know his name she could not bring herself to ask her old friend who he was. That did not matter. He was, and Charing Cross Road had become a hallowed place by profound experience, the bookshop a room beyond all others holy.

For some time longer, Clara sat in silence with her old friend, who lit his after-luncheon pipe and sat cross-legged, blinking and ruminant. She stared into the shop, and still it seemed that the remarkable figure was standing there fingering the books, pondering, deciding. Her emotions thrilled through her, uplifted her, and she had a sensation of being deliciously intimate with all things animate and inanimate. She touched the desk by her side, and it seemed to her that life tingled through her fingers into the wood. She smiled at the old man, and his eyes twitched, and he gave her a little happy sidelong nod. She wanted to tell him that the world was a very wonderful place, but she could only keep on smiling, and as she left the shop, the bookseller thrust his hat on the back of his head, scratched his beard, and said,—

'Pegs! I said to Jenny she'll bring me luck. But she's wasted on yon birkie ca'd a lord.'

IX

MAGIC

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 for The Tempest in my time.'

'It is an enchanted island,' said Clara.

'But Prospero was Duke of Milan.... I've been to 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 reading The Tempest till 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 be
As heavy to me as 'tis odious; but
The mistress which I serve quickens what's dead
And makes my labours pleasures: Oh, she is
Ten times more gentle than her father's crabbed;
And he's composed of harshness. I must remove
Some thousands of these logs and pile them up,
Upon a sore injunction: my sweet mistress
Weeps when she sees me work; and says such baseness
Had 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?'

'When The Tempest is done we'll see about it. I don't want to risk that. The Tempest is 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 know
One of my sex! no woman's face remember,
Save, from my glass, mine own; nor have I seen
More 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 wish
Any 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.

X

THE ENGLISH LAKES

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. I turned 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 of The 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 the Merchant 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 sands
And 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. She won'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, and the 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.

XI

CHARING CROSS ROAD

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 for Hedda Gabler and John 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.