Part 25

Just as he was leaving Mary said shyly: "I hope, Mr. Samphire, we shall hear of your getting married. If ever a gentleman wanted a wife to look after him, you are he."

Mark laughed; then he replied in his easy, genial way: "Yes, yes; if you had a twin sister, Honeydew, I should ask her to live up a tree with me."

Alone at Hampstead, he wondered whether a wife was waiting for him somewhere: a kind, sweet creature, who would teach him to forget. Drax had told him that, humanly speaking, he was now free from that insidious disease which spares so few of its victims. With care he might live out his three-score years and ten; he could marry--if he so pleased. And for the first time since his father's death, a balance, steadily increasing, lay at his bankers.

About midsummer he began his first play--a comedy, which had been simmering in his brain for many months. He showed the scenario to Greatorex, who was not encouraging.

"You've immense difficulties ahead of you. Your unknown playwright must write his play for one actor-manager, whose ability it illumines" (Tommy was quoting from an article of his on the modern drama), "and whose weakness it obscures. And your moral purpose must be disguised, so as to give the dramatic critic a chance to discover it. Personally, there's nothing I enjoy so much as discovering in a play something which the author never thought of. Now, then, having written your play, you must persuade your actor-manager to spend some thousands in producing it adequately. All said and done, I'd stick to novels, if I were you."

"I must write this play," said Mark.

He wrote it and rewrote it. Then he read it aloud to Greatorex, who pointed out many technical blunders. Not till the play was actable in every detail would Tommy pass it as fit to be sent the rounds.

And then followed interminable, heartbreaking delays and disappointments. Actors and actresses, with rare exceptions, keep plays for months without reading them, answer no letters, and unhesitatingly break all promises unprotected by iron-clad contracts. Finally, the comedy, returned for the sixth time, was flung by Mark into a drawer and forgotten.

Next summer Mark read in his morning paper the announcement of a son born to Archibald. A son! It was enough that the fellow should desire anything, anything, for the object to fall into his grasp! Then, in a passionate revulsion of feeling, wondering how Betty fared, he hastened to Chelsea and furtively interviewed Dibdin, who assured him that his mistress was doing not only as well as, but better than, the doctor expected. Mark gave Dibdin a sovereign and instructions to report once a day by letter for three weeks. Dibdin, an old friend and as discreet as an archbishop, promised to write, volunteering the information that the baby was an "uncommon fine boy, a Samphire every inch of him." From Jim Corrance, later, Mark learned that Betty was likely to prove an adoring mother. Jim had seen her with the urchin. "She has changed," he told Mark, in his blunt fashion. "It's natural, I suppose; one couldn't wish for anything else; but the Betty of King's Charteris is out of sight. As for Archie--he looks patriarchal."

If Jim wondered why Mark never entered his brother's house, he was too shrewd to ask questions. Perhaps he guessed more or less accurately at the truth. A score of times, Mark was tempted to take his arm and tell his old friend everything. Betty, however, could not be betrayed; and speech with reserves, with abysmal silences, would avail nothing. But if he could have unburdened his soul, what a relief, what a balm it would have proved!

After writing some pot-boiling short stories and articles, he plunged into a second play, a tragedy, dealing with the inevitable surrender of woman to tradition and convention. In accordance with Tommy Greatorex's advice, this play was built up for Mrs. Perowne, an English actress-manager, who had recently returned from an enormously successful tour in the United States and Australia. Mark went to see her act again and again, fascinated by her methods, which were those of Duse, and by her vivid and extraordinary beauty. She had red hair, a milk-white skin, a Spanish cast of features, the spirits and inconsequence of a child, and amazing physical and intellectual activity. Mr. Perowne, an American, had divorced her after a very stormy year of marriage. Since, he had died.

This second play, _Fenella_, was written in a spirit compounded of recklessness and patience. Mark was reckless inasmuch as his money was nearly gone; patient, because the artist within him told him that he must make haste slowly. But at the back of this supreme endeavour, ever-increasing and all-absorbing, was the determination to achieve a success which would surpass that of his brother. Archibald and he never met, for Mark saw none of his old friends save Pynsent and Jim Corrance, but Archibald's name and fame were for ever in his ears. A great reputation is hard to make in England, or elsewhere, but once made it is easily sustained. The Basilica was crowded every Sunday morning. Mark slipped in one day, wondering what sort of fare would be provided. He found it nicely flavoured to the palate of the town. Jim Corrance growled out, "Archie gives 'em easily digested food. Of course he hasn't time to prepare such sermons as that Westchester one. He's up to his eyes in parochial work. That's what makes bishops nowadays."

Mark saw Betty in her pew without being seen by her. She looked pale and thin, but not unhappy.

After the visit to the Basilica Mark worked even harder than before, although he worked in the open air, and with due regard for his health. If that failed again, he was conscious that he would be bankrupt indeed. Accordingly, he lived a life of Spartan simplicity, and played golf regularly with Jim or Tommy Greatorex. But _Fenella_ obsessed him. He told Jim that he was glad the comedy had not been produced, because _Fenella_ was stronger and better written. Tommy growled out protests and warnings: "_Fenella_, whose acquaintance I'm anxious to make, may prove an ungrateful hussy. For Heaven's sake don't pin your hopes to her petticoat!"

When the fourth act was nearly finished, Sybil Perowne appeared in a new play, an adaptation of a French drama, which had enjoyed a _succes fou_ in Paris. Mark and Tommy went to see it and found an audience cold and indifferent. As they came out of the theatre, Mark heard a stout dowager whisper to her daughter, "My dear, I don't know what it means, but it's taken away my appetite for supper."

"There you are," said Tommy. "Beware, Mark, of tampering with the British playgoer's appetite for supper. This thing is too sad. It won't go. Ah, well, the shrewdest managers make abominable mistakes, and the most successful is the fellow who makes least."

"_Fenella_ is sadder than this."

"Um!" said Tommy. "Sorry to hear that, my boy."

But when the tragedy was read aloud, Greatorex professed himself amazed. He jumped up excitedly.

"I believe you've found yourself, 'pon my soul! And Sybil is mad keen for a new play. Hullo! Phew-w-w!"

Mark had fainted.

When he came to himself he admitted that he had been unable to sleep for several nights. Tommy talked like a sage, advising moderation, but knowing--none better--that _Fenella_ could never have been born without pangs. With his sense of the dramatic he perceived that Mark in his present condition would be likely to impress the actress, herself highly strung and emotional. The good fellow took pains to arrange an interview, obtaining permission to call and bring a friend.

"I've cracked you up as the coming novelist, who's dying to make her acquaintance. I said in a postscript that you raved about her."

"She is magnificent," said Mark.

"She never reads plays. But you must corner her. Spar free! I tell you frankly she's a slippery one. I was her Press agent for a season. If possible, I want her to hear all about her part before she hands the play on to that scoundrel Gonzales."

Gonzales was Mrs. Perowne's manager. Mark frowned when his name was mentioned. He had heard of Gonzales.

Mrs. Perowne made the appointment for three. At two Mark met Greatorex in his rooms. Tommy was in his oldest clothes and hard at work.

"I'm not coming," he announced. "Never meant to, either. Why, man, I should wreck your chance. Here's a letter with a gilt-edged lie in it. Have you the play? Yes. Now, look here; leave it in the hall with your overcoat. Persuade her, if you can, to listen to the last scene of the third act. Don't leave the house without giving her some of it, if you have to force it down her throat. She'll respect your determination. Report here."

"I c-c-can't r-r-read it," stammered Mark.

Tommy hit his desk so hard with his fist that the ink bespattered it.

"Mark," he said solemnly, "I am counting on your making an exhibition of yourself. Be sure to stammer, burst a blood-vessel, faint, have a fit, but stick to your job. Now--go!"

Mark was pushed out of the room by his friend. When the door slammed behind him Greatorex burst out laughing. "He won't stammer now, and he'll read his play."

Mark was shown by an irreproachable butler into a small room hung with silk and filled with Japanese furniture. The dominant note was the grotesque if not the monstrous. Everything--from the embroideries on the walls to the tiny carved figures in the cabinets--indicated the cult of deformity.

He was examining a bit of enamel when Mrs. Perowne came in, holding out both hands.

"Tommy's friends are always welcome here," she said graciously. "That's a nice bit--isn't it? It's not Japanese at all, but Byzantine, as I dare say you know."

Mark confessed that he knew nothing of enamels. He sat down, glancing at his hostess, who was not unconscious of his scrutiny and surprise. Always, men meeting her for the first time off the stage were amazed at her appearance of youth. She braved the light from the window with impunity. Hair, complexion, eyes might have belonged to a maiden of twenty. But the mouth--her most remarkable feature--betrayed the woman of maturity. It was large, finely curved, and mobile. Her eyes were of a rich chestnut tint.

"You want to tell me about a play?" she said, with a low laugh.

"How did you d-d-divine that?"

"The expression of a man who has written a play is unmistakable. Well, I am in a charming humour this afternoon. What is the play about? _A propos_--are you the famous Mr. Samphire's brother?"

Unconsciously Mark winced.

"Yes," he said shortly.

"Tell me about your play."

"I c-c-can't," he said. For a moment he hesitated, feeling the lump rising in his throat; then some emanation from the woman opposite--a sense of sympathy--restored his confidence. His face--so plain when troubled--broke into a smile. "It's like this," he continued: "I hate to give you a synopsis of it. L-l-let me read a scene or two. You can make up your mind in a jiffy whether it pleases you or not; and if it doesn't, I'll go at a nod from you."

"But I never listen to plays. Surely that wretch, Tommy, told you. I talk them over before they're written. I've got someone coming in three-quarters of an hour to talk over an unwritten play. The hundreds which are sent to me to read are always passed on to Alfred Gonzales."

Mark felt his confidence oozing from every pore. In another minute his hostess would be bored. At this ignominious probability his fighting instincts asserted themselves.

"I wrote this play for you," he said slowly. "I can't see another woman in it at all. And somehow,"--he stretched out his lean, finely formed hands with a dramatic gesture--"somehow I seem to have gripped you, elusive though you are. Tommy says you're a good sort. Be good to me--for ten minutes. The play's downstairs in the hall. Let me fetch it. Shall I?"

"Yes--fetch it."

He ran like a boy from the room. Mrs. Perowne got up, glanced at herself in a small mirror, and sat down in the seat which Mark had just left. The change was not without significance. Before, she had wished to be seen; now she wished to see. When Mark came back she said quietly: "Begin at the beginning."

At that moment Mark felt once more the accursed lump in his throat. His face contracted. The woman closely watching him rose and laid her hand upon his shoulder.

"You have an impediment of speech," she whispered. "Take your time. You have interested me. I like men who surmount obstacles. I'll sit here till you can read your play. I'm going to mix two tiny cocktails, Martigny cocktails: mild as Mary's little lamb."

When she came back Mark was at his ease; she had ceased to be a stranger. He drank the cocktail, and began the first act. Mrs. Perowne lay back in her chair, watching him with half-closed eyes. She never moved, absorbing in silence every word and intonation. When Mark had finished, she nodded gaily.

"The first act is capital. When will you come and read the others?"

"At any hour you choose--day or night."

"To-morrow at twelve then. You must stay to luncheon afterwards."

*CHAPTER XXXVII*

*POPPY AND MANDRAGORA*

Half an hour later Mark was describing what had passed to Greatorex, who listened with an odd smile upon his ugly, intelligent face: the smile which is typical of so much that is left unsaid, the smile of a knowledge and an experience which cannot be imparted. Greatorex had appetite for such food as Mark was giving him, and he demanded every crumb. While Mark was speaking the journalist smoked. The smoke ascended in fragrant clouds, melting into the thickening atmosphere of the room. It struck Greatorex, not for the first time, that the reek of good tobacco manifested all the things for which men strive and to which it would seem to be predestined that they should not attain. Greatorex asked himself what life would be without the fragrance of hopes and ambitions which float from us and vanish. And how stale, how offensive their odour becomes unless the windows of the mind be flung wide open!

"Mark," he said, dropping the end of his cigarette, "you are desperately keen on this?"

He meant his words to be taken as affirmation or interrogation, according to Mark's mood. He never invited confidences withheld.

"Yes," Mark replied.

"Why?"

When the eyes of the two men countered, a third person would have remarked in them an extraordinary difference in colour and quality. Greatorex had the onyx eyes of a gipsy, bright yet obscured by mysterious flickering tints, the eyes which conceal and so seldom reveal the thoughts behind them. Mark's blue eyes had that candid expression which pertains to children's eyes.

"Why?" Mark repeated the pregnant word. "I think you know why. I have failed in everything I have undertaken. I have pursued success as if it were a will-o'-the-wisp----"

"Which it is----"

"And if once I could hold it in my hand, if I could say to myself, I have it--it is mine--why then----"

He paused.

"You care so much for fame--you?"

"I ask for recognition, not because recognition is in itself a hall mark of success, but because without it labour would seem to be wasted. What is the use of a great poem, a great book, which remains unread? A gospel is no gospel until it is preached to thousands."

"Don't set your heart on this play being produced!"

"I _have_ set my heart on that, Tommy."

"If Sybil takes a fancy to you----" he paused.

Mark's ingenuous stare was disconcerting. He continued lightly: "I warn you that she may like you better than _Fenella_. It would not surprise me if she liked you rather too well."

"Don't be a fool," said Mark angrily.

"If I could only be a fool," Greatorex murmured. "Depend upon it fools have the best of it. And they live, some of 'em, in the only paradise to be found on this planet. Well, I have spoken, I have warned you."

Upon the following day Mark returned at the hour appointed to Mrs. Perowne's flat. The butler, impassive as the Sphinx, showed him into the same room with its curious atmosphere of the East. In a few minutes the actress appeared in a _kimono_ of some silvery tissue embroidered in gold, with her hair done _a la Japonaise_, and embellished with barbaric ornaments. Clad in this she became a part, and the greatest part, of the room. Looking at her, Mark felt ill at ease in his blue serge suit. At the same time he tried to measure the difference between the woman in the _kimono_ and all other women whom he had known. Mrs. Perowne smiled, reading his thoughts.

"I am quite, quite different to all the others," she said softly. "I ought to have lived in the days of Herod Antipas."

When she spoke of Herod, Mark remembered that she had Jewish blood in her veins. Her father had been a well-known English picture-dealer; her mother, a famous dancer, a Spanish Moor. Her Moorish ancestors, of whom the actress boasted, were Jews to the marrow, although living in Spain, outwardly subject to the faith of most Catholic monarchs. For generations these people had lived and died incomparable actors, sustaining from the cradle to the grave a role above which glittered the knives of the Inquisition. Mark began to understand that the woman smiling at him was natural, most true to herself, when playing a part--and yet beneath a thousand disguises throbbed the heart of the Jewess, the child of all countries and of none.

Mark read his play.

As he read it, he realised how poor an instrument lay in his throat. He was hoarse from a neglected cold, and his voice, though flexible, betrayed the effort made to control it. But the stammer spared him. To Sybil Perowne, familiar with and therefore slightly contemptuous of the arts of the elocutionist, this rough, uneven inflection and articulation had something of the charm of a disused viol or harpsichord, whose frayed, worn strings still hold jangled echoes of cadences melodic and harmonious long ago. She had the perceptions of the artist, and that feeling for art which is partly a gift and partly the result of patient training. Her perceptions enabled her to see Mark Samphire as he was, the man who had fought against odds; her feeling for art approved his work as the epitome and expression of that fight dramatically set forth in admirable English. At the end of the second act the reader looked up for a word of approval: "Go on!" she said. The climax of the third act provoked an exclamation at Mark's physical distress. She brought him a glass of champagne and insisted upon his drinking it. But he saw that her eyes were shining. He plunged into the fourth act and stumbled through it: every word rasping his throat. When he had finished she jumped up as Greatorex had done.

"I am a woman of impulse," she cried. "I will produce your play."

Mark stared at her, not believing his ears.

"You will p-p-produce it?" he stammered.

"Yes," she answered. "I don't say there's money in it; I don't say it hasn't faults and crudities; but I do say it's a play--and it pleases, it touches, it thrills--me."

She held out her hand. Mark had an intuition that she wished him to kiss it. He raised it gratefully to his lips.

"And now," she said gaily, "luncheon! I am famished. There is no sauce like emotion. That is why Spanish people eat so much at funerals."

At luncheon she asked a score of questions about his work and life.

"Last night," she said, "I read _The Songs of the Angels_. You have heard these songs yourself, eh? But--do you hear them now?"

She held his glance, faintly smiling at the colour which rushed into his cheeks.

"There are angels and angels," he said evasively.

"But, if I have interpreted your meaning, the angels you write about are heard only by the--shall I offend you if I say--the saints. You are not a saint?"

"Hardly," said Mark.

"But you might be," she murmured; "that is why you interest me"--she paused, sighed, and finished the sentence--"so much. I have never met a saint; I have never met a man who had the makings of a saint in him--till to-day."

Mark knew that she had challenged him.

"Out of the makings of a saint," he said curtly, "the devil fashions the greatest sinner."

"You believe in the devil?"

Mark shrugged his shoulders.

"The devil is 'evil' with a big D before it. I certainly believe in evil."

"I have to drag answers from you. Do you dislike this sort of talk? Perhaps you think me indiscreet, impudent; but I like to get my bearings. It saves bother. You can ask me anything--anything, if, if you regard me as a friend."

"I do," he said hastily; but he asked no questions.

"I don't quite understand you," she said slowly; "and of course you don't understand me. I am sure, judging from your book, your play, and--and your face, that you have an extravagant admiration for what you think to be good women. Is it not so? You needn't take the trouble to say 'yes.' And I'm only a good--_sort_. I have a sound body, of which I take the greatest care, and a sane mind; but I was born without a soul. _Enfin_, the conclusion is inevitable--for me--I do not believe in the soul but you do?"

"I did," he answered.

She offered him a cigarette, and lit one herself, as the Sphinx-like butler brought coffee and liqueurs. The luncheon had been very simple. Sipping her coffee, the actress began to talk of _Fenella_.

"You wrote the part, you say, for me; but you have drawn _Fenella_ from life."

Mark denied this.

"You may have done it subconsciously, but you've done it. Now tell me, have you worked out the technical details? Have you estimated the probable expense?"

"I suppose the adequate mounting of it will be costly."

"Between three and four thousand pounds," said Mrs. Perowne carelessly.

Soon after he took his leave. The play remained in the actress's possession. No mention was made of terms. Mrs. Perowne had said that Gonzales would look it over. Greatorex expressed astonishment that the affair had come to a head so suddenly, and congratulated Mark; but he added that a contract must be signed as soon as possible.

"You don't think----" began Mark.

"My dear fellow, I know a poor devil whose first play was accepted six years ago. It has not been produced yet! Strictly between ourselves, I don't mind telling you that I'm the man."

"But if your lawyer----"

"I can't afford to make an enemy of the actor-manager who _still_ has it! I blame myself; I had no contract. We'll prepare a corker for you. I take it that you want nothing if the thing fails, and a fair profit if it goes--eh? Just so. When do you see the fascinating Sybil again? To-morrow. Have you made love to her? She expects it from every man. Not many disappoint her."

He laughed at Mark's confusion, and compared him to the infant Moses found by Pharaoh's daughter in the bulrushes. The friends celebrated the acceptance of the drama at a restaurant, and Mark made merry.

"You feel it?" said Tommy.

"Eh?"

"Success tickling the palm of your hand?"

"I shall mark this day with red, of course!"

"If we were in the West of America," said Greatorex, "we should paint the night as red as _la belle_ Sybil's hair. This sort of thing has only a tinge of pink in it. Have you ever let yourself go, Mark? Of course not! There is nothing of the beast in you. You might kill yourself, or somebody else, but I can't fancy you on all fours."

They returned to the club, where some choice spirits were discussing art and literature in a fog of tobacco-smoke. But Mark, who joined them, saw no fog--only the sun, shining upon all things and all men.

"He's had a four-act play accepted," Greatorex explained. "There's no more to tell yet."