Chapter 2

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?'